Martian Rainbow

by Robert L. Forward

  Bucephalus left the hydrogen and antihydrogen tanks behind and came up on the crew compartment. It was painted in bold red and white stripes, with a star-spangled blue nose. The word LEXINGTON marched proudly across its side in gold foil letters. Major Thomas brought Bucephalus to a halt about half a kilometer out from the docking ports at the base of the crew section where it joined to the central truss of the ship. Alexander watched out the viewports critically.

  "Take me around, Betsy," he hollered toward the flight deck. Immediately Bucephalus began a sideways circular maneuver around the neck of the Lexington, stubby wings level. Alexander swiveled in his gimballed command chair to keep the activities in view. Three of the four attack landers had undocked from the Lexington and were in formation, and the fourth was pulling away from its docking port to join them. One of the larger support landers was also ready and waiting. It had large red crosses on the wings and sides.

  "Captain Harrison!" Alexander yelled. "Tell that med ship I'm coming aboard for an inspection. Betsy! Take me down."

  While Alexander donned his helmet, Major Thomas rolled Bucephalus and dove the ship down to come to a controlled stop with the two airlock ports just a meter apart.

  ALEXANDER cycled through the airlocks with the sergeant, then handed his helmet to him on the other side. He was met by a man dressed in a lime-green Marsuit with large red crosses on the front and back. The man held his helmet in his left arm and extended his right hand.

  "Welcome aboard the Walter Reed, General Armstrong. I'm Colonel Waters, chief surgeon and commander."

  As Alexander shook Colonel Waters' hand, he took time to notice the special flexigloves that the medical corps wore. They were lightweight and skintight, with heater wires instead of insulation to keep the cold out. They also had active controls built into the cuff to keep the air in the glove at constant volume so the fingers didn't have to fight the pressure differential. Too delicate for fighting men, Alexander thought.

  "I'm glad to see the medical corps is taking 'battle conditions' seriously and is suited up," Alexander said.

  "Yes, indeed!" Colonel Waters said. "We all are in Marsuits for the duration of the battle, and our helmets are never more than an armlength away. We are firm believers in 'zero loss warfare.' "

  "So am I," Alexander said approvingly. "Long butcher lists make for short careers. Show me the rest of the ship; but make it short, I have more inspections to make."

  They stopped in a small room packed with eight men buckled into seats in their helmeted lime-green Marsuits with red crosses visible from all angles.

  "This is our equivalent of the medevac system used in Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, and our present Baltic-front standoff with the Russian Neocommunists, after their coup and attempted reannexation of the Baltic republics. As soon as we land near the attack group that we support, these corpsmen leave by that port there, pull out the four rocket-propelled 'hoppers' from the un-pressurized bay below, and use them to take up positions behind the front lines, waiting for a call. If a trooper is injured, they fly in, stabilize the injured man, get him on a stretcher, then use the hopper to fly him back right into this transfer lock. The door closes, the room is pressurized, and the stretcher is moved into the trauma center through this next lock."

  Colonel Waters moved through the lock. "If the trooper is alive when he passes through this lock, the chances of him staying alive are over 98 percent. With modern transport technology and modern medicine, a nation can now engage in limited warfare with almost zero loss of its troops."

  "Politicians have changed, too," Alexander said. "They used to be able to fight wars on the cheap, by drafting warm bodies, forcing them to fight, paying them a pittance, and forgetting about them afterward. Now, when they asked me to lead this invasion, I told them what I needed, and they gave it to me—with every button and buzzer that could be attached. The last thing those pious bastards want is to be blamed for high casualties because of penny-pinching."

  They entered the main body of the medical ship. There were four separate trauma centers, each with two doctors at attention. They all had Marsuits on, with their helmets in wall brackets within easy reach.

  "Each doctor has a specialty relevant to the upcoming situation—burns, frostbite, compound fractures, carbon dioxide poisoning, laser eye damage, and so forth. Most have been cross-trained in other specialties as well as anesthesiology. Both pilot and copilot are cross-trained as medic-nurses, and we will use the medics that bring back the troops as surgical nurses if needed."

  Alexander looked around approvingly. "Excellent, Colonel Waters. I like what I see."

  "Down below are the diagnostic machines and all the medical supplies we could possibly have need for," Colonel Waters continued. "On the way out to Mars we had each of the troopers we support give six pints of blood. It is waiting here for him in case he needs it, along with plenty of artificial blood if that runs out."

  "Better medicine is not the only way to achieve zero loss warfare," Alexander said—starting to brag. "The strategy and tactics I developed for this invasion will be textbook examples of that old military maxim, 'The objective of war is not to give your life for your country, but to make the enemy give his life for his country.' I have achieved complete surprise. I will overwhelm all targets with superior firepower and dare them not to surrender. And if we have to attack, it will be machines, not men, leading the charge.

  "If things go the way I've planned ..." He paused to poke the surgeon in the chest with a golden finger. "You'll never have a customer!"

  Colonel Waters looked a trifle disconcerted for a fraction of a second, then recovered. "Of course ... Of course! That would be the best result, wouldn't it?"

  "Let's go!" Alexander said to the sergeant, and made his way back down the corridors.

  THEIR LAST stop was a visit to an attack lander floating next to the Bunker Hill spacecraft. Alexander waited until his personal videos specialist had passed through the airlock, then he boarded as the specialist captured the event for the battle video network.

  All through the fleet, the general was seen to enter through the lock, raise his arms to remove his crested helmet from his head, then hold the helmet under his left arm like a medieval king in gilded battle armor addressing his troops.

  Alexander glanced around the crowded attack lander at the troopers in their armored red-brown camouflage Marsuits. They were all veterans. No inexperienced privates or shave-tail lieutenants in Alexander's army. The troopers were in battle gear with their helmets on, their features distorted by the Diamondhard plastic bowl and partially hidden by the communication gear crammed into the interior around their heads. He knew they were watching a flat image of himself on the holographic lenses built into their faceplates as he talked to them. That same image was being viewed by all the attack troops in all the attack landers that were streaming down like an avenging swarm of bullets at their target—Mars.

  Alexander frowned slightly as he saw what was obviously a woman in the second row of the attack troops. He didn't like women on the front line, but the recent court expansion of the Equal Rights Amendment into the military service domain meant he couldn't keep them out if they volunteered and qualified, and could overcome the hidden hurdles that were placed in their way by Alexander and the other hard-liners.

  Well, Alexander thought, if the chickie got here, she must be one tough biddy. I pity the poor Martians. He put on his commander's face, activated his commander's voice, and looked imperiously around at the hold full of troopers that represented all the troops that were now watching his ghosdy image superimposed on their helmet faceplates.

  "Men," Alexander said, "we are about to embark on a battle that will change the tide of human history. Never before have the peoples of one planet breached the atmosphere of another planet in anger. But, as you know, we have a right to be angry. We cannot allow those on Mars to block the access of Earth to the resources of the asteroid belt and the outer solar system. We have attempted negotiations
and those attempts have been rejected. It is time for Earth to take action, and you are the strong right arm of Earth." His voice grew louder.

  "You must strike! And you must strike hard!

  "Yet—" He paused, and his voice softened, "—you must not strike in anger. We are many. We are well trained. We have superior weapons. There is no question that we will win this battle; the only question is how many will have to die before it is over. I want you to be brave—for the enemy scatters before brave troops. But I do not want you to be foolhardy. You have superior weapons. Use them to destroy the enemy's equipment and weapons. You have superior training. Use it to frustrate the enemy's attempts to maneuver. You have superior numbers. Use them to convince the enemy that surrender is the wiser choice.

  "If you use your advantages poorly, we will still win the battle, but in winning the battle we will have lost the war, for the casualty lists will cause sorrow to our side and produce lasting bitterness in our conquered foe. If you use your advantages properly, then we will not only win the battle and the war, but we will have gained what Earth desires, a unified solar system that is open to all."

  Alexander raised his right hand in a stiff salute.

  "I salute you—brave men." He paused and changed his demeanor from that of pontificating statesman to that of a commander of battle.

  "We attack at 0800!" he yelled, shoving his golden-gloved fist into the air, then burst into a proud grin as the strapped-in troopers in the crowded hold returned a muffled yell and shook their weapons in the air. Alexander lifted his helmet, then lowered it over his head as if crowning himself. The last image sent to the troops was the firm grin and the famous crinkled crow's-feet on his space-weathered face pointing to his deeply penetrating steel-gray eyes.

  ALEXANDER returned to his attack lander and climbed into his gimballed command post. It was now 0450, just a little over three hours to attack time. He pulled down the battle visor and was instantly back in the imaginary Battle Control Center. He glanced quickly around the room, saw no blinking lights trying to attract his attention, and then looked down at the Signals Group immediately below him. This group was manned by people that Alexander always regarded as a little weird. Imagine, he shuddered—spending your whole life talking to and even listening to computers!

  "Signals?" Alexander queried.

  "There has been no significant change in the radio emissions generated by any of the sites on Mars," said the rumpled icon of a fat man with a large bald spot on top of his head and long unkempt hair that looked like the owner never had time for a barber. The image zoomed slightly and turned into real video. The fat man pushed his glasses up on his face, and Alexander noticed that he wore trifocals with an extrawide midsection designed for taking in a complete computer screen in one glance.

  "Our computers tell us that it is almost certain—99.3 percent certain—that they don't know we are here. This high probability is mostly based on the fact that their radars are pointed in the direction of our decoy swarm coming along the standard trajectory from Earth to Mars."

  The one that will arrive some six months from now, Alexander thought.

  "Are you ready with the jammers?" he asked aloud.

  The fat man looked annoyed, then resigned, as he explained it to Alexander all over again. "Please. Nothing so crude as jamming, General Armstrong. We have deployed an array of transceivers between Mars and Earth. Any transmissions from Mars will be received and used to produce amplified and inverted versions of the signals. The waves from these inverted versions of the signals will cancel out the original signals in the direction of the Earth. In their place we insert a set of computer-generated radio signals containing typical messages similar to ones they have sent before. That way their allies on Earth will not know about the attack until it is all over. The system works both ways, although we will not activate the Earth signal blocking mode unless our computers detect some sort of warning message. We also have similar arrays set to pass between Mars and its moons when we attack the moons."

  "Good," Alexander said. "Continue to do whatever it is you do."

  A light inset in a distant console in the imaginary Battle Control Center was now blinking. At first it had a normal white color and was blinking slowly, but as time went on, it slowly changed color from white to yellow to red, and the rate of blinking sped up. Other consoles were also starting to emit slow white blinks of light. It was approaching attack time and some of the flights had to be on their way early to arrive on target in synchronism with the main attack. Alexander picked out the reddest and fastest-blinking light. It was on the console of the commander of the U.S. First Squadron augmented by the Japanese flight. This Squadron was to attack the base on the outer moon Deimos. Alexander widened his eyes at the staring icons of Colonel Bradshaw and Admiral Takahashi, and spoke.

  "I trust you are now ready for the attack?" he said severely, knowing full well they were, for the status board below him was all green for the First Squadron.

  The icon of Colonel Bradshaw awoke and spoke briskly. "First Squadron Augmented all ready for attack, sir! The Signals Group Distant Imaging Team reports only twenty-two of the enemy at Deimos base, two outside, two in work quarters, probably awake, and eighteen in living quarters, probably asleep."

  "Sixteen attack landers with 304 fighting men will give you almost fifteen-to-one odds. I expect zero losses for this objective."

  "I will bring all my men back," Colonel Bradshaw promised.

  Alexander paused for a second, thinking, then asked, "Were the outside men at the antispacecraft missile launch site?"

  "The outside men seem to be on their way to an automated drilling site on the sunlit side of the moon. There is no one presently at the missile launch site."

  "Have a few landers deployed to secure the missile site and cut the comm links," Alexander said. "We don't want anyone escaping capture and launching them off." He blinked Bradshaw's icon off before he could reply, for there were other blinking lights in the imaginary Battle Control Center that were turning redder and blinking faster as they called for his attention.

  Alexander grinned and the crow's-feet crinkled at the corners of his eyes as he thought about the many surprises the power-hungry, nation-swallowing, planet-grabbing, atheistic Neocommunists down on Mars had coming this day.

  CHAPTER 2

  Landing On Mars

  THE ATTACK was scheduled at 0800 Mars Zebra Time. That made it midnight at the main target, the base near Olympus Mons that the Neocommunists had unimaginatively called "Novomoskovsk". The Electromagnetic Ferret and Distant Imaging Teams in the Signals Group had identified over three hundred people stationed at Novomoskovsk. Most of them were in bed.

  Except for the base-bound "rush hour" of scientific and maintenance vehicles as darkness had approached, the only significant traffic in the past eight hours had been the launch of a suborbital ballistic transport from Novomoskovsk to Novomurmansk at the North Pole of Mars. The transport must have been on an urgent mission, since it carried only three passengers, and one of those passengers was the commissar of Mars—or Novorossiysk, as he had renamed the planet. Alexander was a little annoyed that the commissar would not be captured in his home lair, but from a tactical point of view, the commissar's absence from his command center at the time of attack would make Alexander's job all the easier.

  The fleet of 160 attack landers, having pulled far ahead of the still quiescent interplanetary spacecraft that had transported them there, now zoomed straight down at Syrtis Major, the midday point on Mars. They were followed closely by their 160 medic ships and 160 quartermaster ships. In the center of the pyramid array of ten Squadrons was Bucephalus, the golden ship of Alexander.

  Soon the First Squadron broke away and headed for Deimos, around to the east of the planet. Then the Second Squadron started to decelerate to come to a halt at Phobos, doing so with fuel-inefficient maneuvers that avoided pointing the main engine exhausts of the landers directly at Mars or the moons. The remaining 384
ships hit the thin upper atmosphere of Mars at high speed, their heavy thermal insulation giving off a bright, but unseen, red glow high in the dusty pink midday Martian sky above the unpopulated Syrtis Major Plain. They showered the empty cratered highlands of Tyrrhena and Arabia with unheard sonic booms, then scattered in different directions to find their targets, some halfway around the globe. Bucephalus went into a low polar orbit, while robotic probes controlled by the Signals Group stationed imaging, ferret, and communications satellites in various orbits all around the globe.

  TWO SMALL figures carrying a heavy metal casting between them danced slowly across the surface of Deimos. The heavy casting moved in a smooth, ponderous arc, while the bodies of the figures holding the casting bounced up and down, their toes making occasional contact with the cratered ground. The two moved out of the shadow and across the terminator into the glaring Sun. Behind them, a huge full Mars started to sink below the horizon.

  "Boris calling Base. Vlad and I are over terminator. Three kilometers to drill site."

  A perfunctory acknowledgment came from the base. The delay was longer than one would expect from the automatic radio relays that covered the tiny moon—the two men on duty must be playing chess again. But there was little else to do during the fifteen-hour "night" on the moon. Boris and Vladimir continued their dance with their heavyweight partner, subtly adjusting its ballistic "orbit" across the surface of the moon at each hop.