Birth Of Fire

by Jerry Pournelle

  Wilson crouched beside me, his helmet touching mine. "Be like the bastards to be off playing cards."

  "That'd fix us," I said. I tongued the mike button. "Big Mama, this is John Henry. Over."

  Nothing. I tried again. And again.

  "There." Wilson was shouting. "There, I saw it! Flash of light!"

  "Maybe." Our photophone target was only a meter in diameter. I slaved our transmitter to our target and waited. Forty miles away Zemansky's troops played their transmitter across our area. When their beam hit our target, our unit sent back a response; with time they would be able to focus in, setting their transmission unit in micrometer steps until it was precisely aimed at our reflector, then narrow the focus. "Maybe."

  "Cheep." It was one of the loveliest sounds I had ever heard, the tone that indicated they'd touched our target with their beam. "Cheep… cheep… cheep, cheep, cheep cheep cheepcheepcheep - Hello, John Henry, this is Big Mama. Do you read us? Over."

  I stood and gave the victory signal, hands together over my head. The men around me were cheering, I knew, but I couldn't hear them. We were in radio silence.

  "Big Mama, I hear you. I read you three by four, over.

  "Stand by, John Henry, incoming mail at twenty-three hundred hours, I say again, twenty-three hundred hours. Godspeed. Big Mama out."

  "So we wait some more," I told Wilson.

  He nodded, but there was a grin a mile wide on his face. I only then realized that he hadn't believed this would work.

  I still wasn't so sure it would.

  THIRTEEN

  I was exhausted, but I couldn't sleep. Neither could the others. We had air to last until morning. The two hours until twenty-three hundred dragged on, and on.

  Back at base camp they would have us located exactly. The survey laser was slaved to their communication unit; once they had it aimed at us, they had direction and range within centimeters. I lay back in my sleeping bag imagining what was happening on the mesa forty miles to the south.

  Eighteen hundred pounds of supplies loaded into the rocket. Ceramic tanks of alcohol and oxygen for propellant. Everything was made of ceramic and fiberglass, everything that could be, so that when the rocket tripped the radar scanners on Deucalion rim above us, it would look to the Feddie observers like nothing more than a meteroid coming in at a shallow angle.

  It would never have worked on Earth.

  I wondered if it would work here. It was a bit late for that question. Twenty-three hundred hours. We watched, and I listened.

  "John Henry, this is Big Mama."

  "Big Mama, go."

  "On the way."

  We saw nothing, of course; the bird didn't need a lot of power to fling it forty miles. It burned out a few seconds after it was launched.

  We waited another minute. "It's there," Big Mama said.

  We were ready. A dozen men were suited up and went out searching with radio receivers. The homing signal the supply rocket sent was deliberately weak, carrying no more than a few hundred meters at most.

  Wait some more. Then one of the troops was running toward me. He came up and gestured. The victory signal.

  We had supplies for three more days.

  The next day was the worst of all. Our packs were full again, and we were climbing uphill. Each step was agony. Onward and upward. Left. Right. But by God we were going to make it! "John Henry say to that Cap'n, looky yonder what I do see, well your hole done choke and your drill done broke, and you can't drive steel like me! Lord God, you can't drive steel like me!"

  In late afternoon we made camp below the rim. There was a Feddie observation post no more than two kilometers away. We knew that from the map, but we never saw it. We crossed the rim at night, when Phobos was up high enough to give light to the weird landscape around us. I left four men and supplies at the lip; they were our signal relay station. Then we strung lines and lowered ourselves into Deucalion crater.

  We made camp after midnight, and we were up at dawn, but now we were confident. At the bottom of the cliffs we divided our already tiny force. Plemmons and nine men angled off to the right, headed for the monorail that ran from the rim to the storage area. My group kept on straight ahead.

  It wasn't a smooth plain. There were rocks and boulders, and the crater floor was cracked and broken. We picked our way across, glad of the wind and dust that made us invisible to anyone above who might be looking down into the crater.

  The next supply rocket was tricky: we had no direct line of sight to Zemansky. Instead we relayed through the detachment on the rim. They had survey equipment and could locate us relative to them; and they were in line of sight to the main camp. It was a simple double-offset problem, and I shouldn't have worried, but I did. I worried about everything.

  The rocket almost hit us. We actually saw it fall, no more than a hundred meters away.

  And on the night of the eighth day, two more: supplies and weapons. Deucalion power station was less than five kilometers ahead. We'd made it.

  "Now the white man that invented that steam drill, well he thought that it was so fine, and John Henry drove in fourteen feet, and the steam drill only made nine, Lord God! and the steam drill only made nine."

  It was an hour before dawn. The men were in position, and there was nothing to do but watch the second hand of my watch as it ticked toward H-hour. I watched it and recalled the last conference with Sarge and Commander Farr.

  "The main garrison is at the rim," Farr had said. "The guards at the storage center itself are mostly officers, and not many of those. It has to be that way. The Feddies don't trust anyone with that kind of power. They don't think they have to, anyway. No one can get close to the depository without alerting the rim garrison. Or so they think.

  "You surprise 'em, you got 'em," Sarge had added. "Just blast your way in. You won't be fightin' more than fifty people. Don't give 'em time to organize. They'll never know what hit them."

  The second hand ticked over. I turned my radio to full power. "Now!"

  Two dozen rocket launchers fired shaped charges at the station in front of us: air locks, tunnel walls, any exposed place. We reloaded and fired another volley. Then we rushed forward.

  Wilson's group had stripped to the minimum, discarding every metal object not needed for survival, then crawled right up to the main entrance. They rushed forward with satchel charges, and dashed away again. The air-lock doors blew off. More rockets were fired into the tunnel to blow holes in the inner doors. Again Wilson's people dashed forward, and the entrance was blown open.

  We poured into the tunnels. We threw grenades into every passageway, never turning a corner without throwing a grenade around it first. There was a guard room just inside the main entrance; they were still struggling into their helmets when we got inside and shot them down.

  They weren't Marsmen. Half the station personnel died because they couldn't find their helmets in time. Many of them had taken off their skintights when they went to bed; these had no chance at all. We grenaded their rooms anyway.

  It became a nightmare. Bloody corpses lay in the corridors, in the barracks, everywhere. We blasted open more airtight doors and threw explosives through them, then dashed down another corridor, firing as we went, yelling and screaming like madmen.

  The only sound was our own screaming. Grenades exploded silently. Rifles grew momentary orange flowers, but soundlessly, soundlessly; through it all we yelled into our radios.

  There is a madness that takes control of men in combat, it is an ugly madness that lets you do things that later you cannot even comprehend. I remember very little of that fight.

  "Wilson. No!" I shouted. We had reached the reactor control room. The door was airtight, and Wilson was placing a plastique charge against it. I had to struggle with him. If his hands had not been occupied with the explosive, if he had held a pistol in one of them, he would have killed me.

  "No," I told him. "We can give them a chance to surrender. They're the last." There was a phone jack on the bu
lkhead, and I plugged my helmet set into it. "Hello in there."

  After a moment there was an answer. "Who the - - who are you?"

  "Acting Lieutenant Pittson, Free Mars Army. Will you surrender?"

  "What will you do with us?" the man demanded "Power station technicians will operate the reactor. Everybody else will be treated as a prisoner of war. We'll be glad to send you back to Marsport as soon as exchanges can be arranged. How many of you are there?"

  There was no answer.

  "I'm sure you can figure out a way to kill me while I stand here talking to you," I said. "And then what? My troops will blast you out of there. If you're waiting for the rim garrison to come rescue you, forget it." I sounded a lot more confident than I was. If everything had gone well, Plemmons had cut the monorail line from the rim, and Zemansky's force was racing across the plains to reinforce us. If.

  "I give you one minute," I said.

  "Can we trust you?"

  "That's a dumb question," I said. "You've got no choice. You have my word as a Free Mars officer that you won't be harmed if you surrender - and my word again that we can and will dig you out if we have to."

  Half the minute went by. Then: "Some of us don't have suits in here. We surrender. But how can we open the door?"

  "We'll manage." After the last few days, a technical problem was a relief. "We'll rig a temporary pressure wall," I said. "Wilson, get on it."

  Deucalion power station was ours.

  "Garrett! I've got a relay to Plemmons!" The signalman was urgently pulling me toward his radio.

  "Okay. A second." I turned to the chief of the power station technicians. "All right. None of our people understands this place." I waved, indicating the control room, with its walls covered with meters and oscilloscopes, and the three big consoles that controlled the system. "But we'll know if power is not getting through to Marsport and Edom, if that power cuts out, we have no reason to hold this place. We'll blow it to hell and gone."

  I turned to one of my own troopers, a nineteen-year-old from California. I spoke loud enough so the dozen prisoners could hear me. "Kehiayaa, you're in charge. If they do anything funny, put 'em outside. You needn't bother with giving them air tanks."

  "Rog."

  "Okay, Doug, let's go."

  Communications were a problem. Plemmons was out on the crater floor somewhere, a long way out of line of sight. The only way we could tails wo through our relay station up on the rim.

  "Barnstorm, this is John Henry, go ahead," I said.

  "John Henry, this is Barnstorm. We cut the monorail. A trainload of Feddies came out of the garrison when you attacked. We stopped the train, but there's two hundred of them headed your way. We can't hold 'em. We'll keep sniping the repair crews to halt the train."

  "How far away?"

  "We're about fifty kilometers from you. They offloaded some tractors."

  "Tractors or tanks?" I asked.

  "Both. I have to go, we're down to four men."

  "God bless you-"

  "Yeah, there's none like us. Barnstorm out."

  "Get me the relay station," I told the communications man.

  "John Henry, this is Relay One. Over."

  "You monitor that call from Plemmons?" “Right.” "Where's the main force?"

  "Headed in at flank speed."

  "Get a message to Zenansky. Have him broadcast to Marsport. We've got the power station. If they shell this place, or take it away from us, we'll blow hell out of it. If they leave us alone, we'll keep the power coming. Make sure everybody knows that. Get Mars Industries Association to understand it, too."

  "Roger, John Henry."

  Wilson had come up while I was talking. "Think they'll hold off?" he asked.

  "Doubt it. Not now, not until they're sure they can't recover the bomb makings. How're you doing on the vault?"

  "Blew open clean. What do we do with that stuff?"

  "Get some of those transport containers out into the flatland, and bury 'em. Report where you've hidden them to Relay One, but don't make any maps.”

  Wilson eyed me narrowly. "It's that way, huh? Okay."

  I took a dozen troops and went forward toward the approaching Feddies. We had to hold them until Zemansky's group could get to us. We deployed in broken ground a kilometer from the big dome-shape of the station.

  "Try to keep between them and the reactor containment," I told them. "They won't shoot heavy stuff if they think it'll wreck the power plant. They don't know how many of us there are. Keep moving, and make 'em think there's a lot." Then we lay down and waited.

  Do men love war? Certainly it is easier to fight than to think about it. What had those Feddies done to me? They were young men, like us, some with families. They'd joined up to see the world, or for the pay, or even, I suppose, because they believed in the Federation and world peace. Now they were coming to kill us, and we were waiting to kill them.

  You think like that when you're waiting. You imagine a bullet tearing through your p-suit, and the blood spurting out, blood pushed by five pounds of pressure so that even veinous blood streams like a fountain. You think of what that bullet can do to you, and what the bullets in your own rifle can do to them. You wonder what the hell you're doing out here, and why you don't run like hell and let the others fight.

  Such thoughts can finish you. If I had them, the others did too. "Sing, damn you," I said.

  "Sing what?" someone asked.

  “Anything.”

  Have you ever heard "The Two Grenadiers?" Why in God's name one of the troops had ever learned that, or why any of us should care about an emperor over two hundred years in his grave, I don't know; what was France to us? But it reminded us of brave men and brave deeds. We lay under the black sky of Mars, dust blowing over us, and listened.

  "… and under her soil to lay me, and when my cross on its scarlet band, over my heart you've bound me, then put my musket in my hand, and belt my sword around me.

  So shall I lie and listen,

  Ayel, keeping shield watch in my grave.."

  Wilson came up behind me. He motioned out toward the horizon. Was the dust thicker out there?

  "… then armed will I rise from out of my grave, and stand as my Emperor's defenderl"

  "Bloody hell, what kind of song is that?" someone shouted. "I'll give you a song!

  When a man grows old, and his balls grow cold…"

  I recognized the voice. Hartig, who boasted that he was the only man on Mars who knew the entire and uncut version of "Eskimo Neff." There was no tune, but it kept us from thinking about what was coming. It went on interminably.

  Wilson nudged me and pointed. The dust was definitely thicker out there. We had another twenty minutes, no more. I thought about where I'd put the men. No point in moving them.

  "…Oh, a moose or two, and a caribou, and a couple of buffalo…"

  I'm no expert on battles and war. After that day I never want to be. But I won't forget lying in the dust, watching the enemy column grow larger while my ears rang with the improbable exploits of Deadeye Dick and Mexico Pete.

  As they started to fan out, we hit the lead tank with three rockets. It stopped, and one crewman leaped out. He ran for shelter, and for a moment it looked as if he'd make it, but then he fell. Deadeye Dick was at Number Eighteen, with Eskimo Nell looking coldly on. The song stopped. There wasn't any need for it; once the fight starts you don't think. You just do what you have to.

  The dust helped; they couldn't know how many they were fighting. They tried to circle around us, but on that broken ground men afoot were as fast as any tractor. And they were not Marsmen. They had been trained to fight on Earth, where they had helicopters, where a man couldn't vanish in deep shadow and be hidden five feet from you and you never know it. We crept among them, using knives in the dark shadow, leaving them to find their comrades with their hoses cut, blood spurting from their ruined lungs.

  Before long they were as afraid as we were. And we couldn't run: without the power s
tation, we'd be out of air inside a few hours. We couldn't run, but they could - as long as they had their tractors.

  I realized that and we concentrated on the vehicles. Crawl through the rocks until you can get a shot at a tractor. Fire the rocket launcher and retreat, leaving the tractor disabled; and let the Feddies wonder how they'll get out when the last tractors are gone.

  They moved their vehicles out of range. Now it was hand-to-hand among the broken rocks. A concentrated charge would have broken through, but they never did that. They came in little groups, trying to infiltrate.

  But they could lose ten to our one, and they'd still win. We were forced back into a tighter and tighter perimeter. I had no count on how many I had left. Twenty? A dozen? I looked at my watch. Incredibly, two hours had passed since the fight had begun.

  They broke past us at two places. I had no choice now. "Into the station," I ordered. We crept in, through the holes we'd blown in the tunnels earlier in the morning, and waited. It was quiet out there.

  Wilson was gone. I called my communications man. "Cet into the control room and tell Kehiayan to stand by. We'll have to blow this place."

  "They haven't come in," Doug said. "What are they waiting for?"

  "Don't know. What are you waiting for? Move -"

  "Kind of hate to give up just now."

  They still weren't coming. We were crouched in the tunnel, weapons facing the entrance. Then there was a bright flash of light out there. I could only see the light, not what caused it. There was another. Something had exploded just at the entrance. I felt the ground shake.

  There was a man at the entrance. Six rifles aimed at him, but he came in with his hands high, waving the red flag of Free Mars.

  The relief force had come.

  FOURTEEN

  We brought the uranium back to Ice Hill. We were greeted as heroes. Saviors of Free Mars. So naturally when I put in for a transfer to a nice, safe, rear-area solar cell production facility, it was granted.

  Like hell. The trouble with armies is the screwups get the soft jobs; do something right and they tag you for another hairy mission. To make it worse, although they did give me a couple of weeks soft duty around Ice Hill, it didn't do much good, because they put Erica on the goddamn atom bomb design project. Here I went and got their uranium and they used it as an excuse to put my girl to work twenty-three hours a day.