by Ron Collins
He expected direct UG advances within the hour.
“I’m worried about Io,” he said, speaking his fears out loud. “They got a late jump.”
“They’ve done their drills,” Yvonne replied.
He smiled at her.
“What do you think, Ms. Barr?” he said to the lead guard. “Will Io be all right?”
The guard hesitated a moment, then spoke her mind.
“They can make up the time.”
“That’s what I needed to hear.”
“It’s the truth, sir,” Barr said. “If it’s true that they have been executing their drills as we have, Io will be fine.”
They came to where the corridor opened to the final staging bay.
The hallway widened and a cool breeze blew over the back of Casmir’s neck. Their already brisk pace quickened, adding a fresh sting to the chill. The smell of Martian dust was acrid here. Members of Universe Three gave him anxious glances as they made their way through the passage. He tried to maintain a sense of calm as they progressed, but the emotions of the moment welled in his throat and he had difficulty breathing. He gave a rumbling cough, which made Yvonne frown.
“You should have seen the doctor,” she said.
“No time now.”
“It takes only a minute.”
He bit back a response because he knew she was right and because he knew that a lack of time wasn’t really his problem.
His problem was that he could handle only one emergency at a time, and it annoyed him that she was worried about him. He was sick, but not an invalid. His last reading said his blood ox was fine enough, and his lung capacity reading was something over 90 percent. The C-Paks would serve him fine, even if he was now tripling up on them. Barring success of the UG response, he was going to live.
They turned a corner to find a woman sitting on a shuttle cart, clearly attempting to move a crate that had gotten wedged between three others. A man was held up behind them.
“Get out of the frickin’ way!” the man said.
“Mind your own goddamned business, Bischoff. I’m not in your way.”
“Shut up and get that crate out of here.”
“Shove it, asshole.”
“I know what I’ll be shovin’ if you don’t hurry your ass up.”
Casmir’s guards moved to confront the pair, but Casmir raised his walking stick to stop them, and went forward instead. He strode toward the pair, came to a stop, and rested the staff against his thighs.
His voice boomed in the hallway. “I couldn’t help noticing there seems to be a problem here.”
The workers cringed when they realized who it was.
“Can anyone tell me what’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the man said. “She’s in my way.”
“I’m trying to get the computer core down to the primary shuttle,” the woman answered before Casmir could ask. “It’s got to be there now, but it’s stuck.”
“Yes,” Casmir said. “We can’t leave our systems behind.”
The two stood silently.
“Tempers are high right now, eh? There is too much to do. Just remember, though, that you are on the same team and that on our team we will die only for those things we believe in.”
“And we believe in the universe,” the two replied in unison.
“Thank you.” He pointed to the woman’s cart. “If you would pull the end of your cart a bit further away from the wall, perhaps this gentleman would be able to get through.”
“Yes, sir,” the woman said.
Casmir turned to Bischoff. “And if you were to have slipped over closer to the wall, I think you could have made it through, anyway.”
“I’m sure you’re right, sir.”
Casmir nodded, then strode on down the hallway to rejoin his entourage.
“Impressive as always,” Yvonne said as they walked away.
“They just needed to be reminded of the goal,” he replied as they entered the final corridor that led to the launch bay.
“That’s why you make a better commander than me,” she replied. “I would have just kicked their asses.”
He laughed out loud, and her expression changed to a broad smile.
“There’s the guy I know,” she said.
As they continued, a robotic pallet zipped along programmed routes to haul more matériel into the mission craft. A trolley shuttle twisted through the hallway like a slalom skier, its gears whining with a low grate. They turned down a series of lesser-used passages, ducking past one of the many air locks he had demanded be built into the network.
He pulled at the sleeve of his uniform and tugged at his collar.
People had seen them earlier, but in just a few moments their party would come to where the escape crafts were being loaded and boarded. The show would get public then and he wanted to appear strong.
“Are you all right?” Yvonne finally asked.
“Yes,” he replied with anger he was embarrassed of.
Yvonne’s face darkened. She didn’t deserve his snippiness.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly enough that only she could hear.
Yvonne reached up and touched his shoulder.
He sighed and let his fingers drift over to take her hand.
“If you happen to have a crystal ball, I would love to know where we are three hours from now,” he said.
Yvonne laughed.
“Should I leave you to walk into the launch bay by yourself?” she said as they came nearer the final staging passages. She let go of his hand.
He gave her a glance as if to say what the hell are you thinking?
“I just thought it might be best if people saw you—”
Casmir waved her off.
“I expect our folks will be more pleased to see you beside me. But I don’t care one way or the other what they think right now. You’ve done as much for U3 as I have. I’m with you. You’re with me.”
Yvonne’s chest rose with a breath, and she relaxed. She gave Casmir’s hand a squeeze, then dropped it to straighten her own jacket.
Lines outlined her lips, and the gray in her hair seemed suddenly more prominent. Like him, she had put on weight recently, and he saw it as shadows under her jawline. Neither of them had kept their fitness as maybe they should have, but then, they had both changed from the early days in other ways, too. Despite that, she was still the same Yvonne in all the ways that mattered. Every bit the warrior she had been when they had first met. Her eyes still gleamed with purpose, and passion was still firmly embedded in the way she carried herself.
“Thank you,” she said.
The soles of their boots echoed in the last few meters of enclosed space as they arrived at the launch bay.
Footsteps came from ahead. A cadet came to a stop before them, somewhat out of breath. “News, sir.”
“What is it?” Casmir said.
“Defense systems report that our ground gun stations have been breached by UG guerillas.”
Casmir looked at the guards, then to Yvonne. The government had broken through their perimeter and, presumably, taken out their outermost defensive positions. The response was even quicker than he had expected, but yes, it had been expected. Gregor Anderson was a very bright man.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s get going. We don’t have much time.”
CHAPTER 14
UGSS Carrier Transport Ambassador
Local Solar Date: March 14, 2206
Local Solar Time: 0505 Hours
United Government Interstellar Command pilot Alex “Deuce” Jarboe sat in the cockpit of his XB-25 Firebrand and tried keep his emotions in check as the plasteel cockpit slammed shut around him.
Despite the fervor of activity throughout the launch bay, the clamor damped to a low buzz when the cockpit engaged. He watched green-shirted enlisted push bomb carts across the deck, and maintenance bots roll along their programmed paths to the places where they would upload final mission profiles into their skimmers. Th
e launch bay was a massive opening that yawned ahead and over him like a cavern built into the carrier’s rearward structure. It was ringed by screens that flashed with a ticker tape of information that flowed across his vision and reminded him of the advertisements that filled up the scoreboards at football stadiums.
Jarboe scanned his Firebrand’s controls. Screens of data flashed with blue and green radiance under his fingertips. They registered O2 levels, target coordinates, the programmed flight plans, and the charged power status of the two Taylor and Getz ion drive engines that he sat over. He ran the containment seal diagnostic and got back a green light. The sound of his breathing was thin in his ears. His hands were dry, but sweat ringed his armpits and made his back grow damp.
Sitting in a fighter-bomber just before launch was a strange sensation. So many people were nearby and so many people were involved in the mission, yet he always felt so alone.
It had taken nearly eight hours for Ambassador, a Solar System class carrier and troop transport, to get close enough to Mars colony to initiate the mission, some forty-thousand clicks from the underground tunnels that were streaming with Universe Three terrorists—specifically including Casmir Francis, their notoriously radical leader. Now that they were here, everything was up to Deuce Jarboe and the rest of his squadron.
Nothing would make him happier than to go down in history as the guy who removed that parasite from the registers of the living.
He watched his new wingman, Todias “Yuletide” Nimchura, strap himself into his skimmer.
Yuletide finished an adjustment, then gave him a perfunctory salute.
Damn right you’ll salute me, Jarboe thought.
Nimchura was a headache he didn’t need right now, to be honest.
He was not your classic problem child, not a pure ego-bloated hothead so much as a guy who didn’t care a whit about anything unless it was directly about flying. But Nimchura had a Mississippi-sized chip on his shoulder when it came to being the best flier in the squadron. The two of them had tussled more times than Jarboe could count during flight school at Miranda Station, usually with a girl as the catalyst. Jarboe never cared much one way or the other about any of the girls, but Nimchura never seemed to tire of trying to put him in his place and Jarboe was always ready for a good challenge. After flight school, Nimchura became your standard-issue hot-as-hell flier who was pathologically unable to take a direct command and whose whining when things didn’t go his way could border on the infantile.
Now, Nimchura was paying for his disregard.
In what Jarboe considered a valiant but misguided attempt to fix his fixation on being a wing leader, Nimchura had been demoted to a wing slot.
And not just any wing: Jarboe’s wing.
Jarboe smirked at the irony, but he had to admit that as he was sitting here on eighty-five terawatts of plasma thruster he was happy enough to have Nimchura on his wing because the fact was that there wasn’t a person born who could outfly the son of a bitch. Assuming they didn’t kill each other in the process, Deuce and Yuletide could make quite a team.
The controller’s voice came over the radio.
“Prelaunch sequence initiated.”
“Roger prelaunch,” he replied.
His cockpit display lit up with blue diagrams that outlined their position, and the taxi diagnostic flickered green in the lower right of his heads-up display.
Thoughts of Sunchaser, Icarus, and Einstein flashed in his mind.
He had buddies on those ships.
Every member of Regi Station, which was where Ambassador was usually stationed, probably did, which would explain the extra crisp essence of professionalism that seemed to crackle over the mission. Every member of the crew was working with a grim-faced sense of purpose. One of them had even hand-signed a rocket they had loaded on his Firebrand.
Remember Sunchaser, Fry Francis, the note read. Then the crewmember had signed his name.
Jarboe’s memory flashed to Janie Lowell, who had been serving on Sunchaser. He remembered the night he, Buster Jones, and the wisecracking Janie had played poker with a group of cadets from Pleiades command. The deck had been marked, of course, but none of Pleiades had been able to prove it until it was too late.
He remembered Janie snarfing in her English accent as only she could as she removed the coated contact lenses that allowed her to read the marks.
He lost touch with her after their Academy days, but they were still tighter than family in his mind—certainly tighter than Jarboe’s actual family ever had been, anyway. Jarboe’s father was a spiteful man, and his mother was an enabler. His brother was a guy with no ambition, and his half-sister was happy to live off her string of boyfriends, who were, oddly, just as content to sponge off her.
The cadets in his class were different.
Every one of them would have hopped the first shuttle to Regi if he had ever needed them.
Even Nimchura.
Jarboe made it a point to never kid himself about the UG and its politics. He rarely understood exactly what was happening above his pay grade.
He understood family, though.
His family.
The idea that he would never again see Janie Lowell made his insides bubble over, and the fact that Universe Three was responsible for her loss was all the justification he needed to step into his Firebrand and point a rocket at Casmir Francis.
He sucked a deep breath and clenched his legs together, feeling his butt cheeks harden against the Firebrand’s seat.
His Firebrand shuddered as munitions officers oversaw the loading of the last of the bombs and shut the bomb bay doors. The skimmer pad they rode on slid away. The launch bay grew silent.
Jarboe looked at Nimchura, who was doing his own personal prep.
“Avenger One, you are go for launch,” a cold voice said over the comm channel.
“Roger that,” he replied.
He gripped the joystick and flexed his fingers.
The automated taxi system took over with a solid thunk. A minute later they were sitting in the staging lock, first in line for launch.
The air in his compartment tasted of plasticized sweat.
The staging door shut behind him, and data from his panel floated like digital ghosts in a sea of absolute darkness. Outside his Firebrand, the vacuum pump pulled atmosphere from the lock, hissing like a wave crashing overhead.
Then there was silence as deep as the darkness.
The launch doors split open to reveal a star-laced curtain of faded blue light.
“Green for launch, Avenger One.”
Jarboe toggled the comm link. “On my sync, Yuletide.”
“Roger that,” Nimchura replied in a sharp blast.
Jarboe couldn’t help a smirk at Nimchura’s professional response.
The pall over the situation seemed to have settled on everyone.
Jarboe punched the catapult’s Go button, and a moment later he was riding rocket boosters on deflection angles to turn the Firebrand into a looping spiral downward toward the Martian surface.
Nimchura pulled in tight on his right.
Jarboe’s targeting system gave a beep as it locked onto Universe Three’s compound.
Now the bastards would pay.
“I have target lock,” Nimchura said over the encrypted channel. “Ready for atmospheric entry.”
“Ditto that, Yuletide. Remember the Sunchaser.”
Entry was standard fare.
The terrain below was orange and craggy in the fresh light of early morning. The slanted angle of the sun cast long shadows over the ground, giving the landscape a harsh, oversaturated sense that reminded him of the rocky foothills of the Mongolian desert where they had trained so long ago.
Their path to the target zone was straightforward and unimpeded.
Universe Three’s antiair defenses were limited to a triangulated set of outdated ground-based laser units, two legs of which had been disabled by a prestrike assault thirty minutes before. Without its ma
tching pair the third laser had almost no chance of targeting any individual threat, so it went into sluice mode, flashing its cadmium blue beam wildly across the sky.
Jarboe timed his pass to avoid the danger.
Nimchura also slid by.
The target looked like barren ground, but preflight intel reported Universe Three’s launch pad was hidden underneath a few meters of crust.
“Roll left,” Jarboe said.
Nimchura peeled away to put a row of chugger missiles into the area, ripping the lid off the launch bay and creating a cloud of smoke and dust that coiled upward through the thin Martian atmosphere.
Jarboe’s heart rate jumped when he saw signs of a spaceport there under the crumbling rock as he lined up his pass. Intel is one thing, but eyes-on confirmation was the nuts.
“Damn right,” he said softly. “Damn right.”
He leveled the XB-25, and thought of his friends from Sunchaser as he released his chugger missiles to fall toward the spaceport.
Suddenly unencumbered, his Firebrand leapt forward.
The arsenal split into multiple warheads, and Deuce Jarboe pulled up on the yoke.
His aircraft rose majestically back toward deep space.
Behind him the target erupted in a massive fireball of orange and black.
CHAPTER 15
Mars: The Hive
Local Solar Date: March 14, 2206
Local Solar Time: 0535 Hours
From his place at the command station and within sight of the three Freedom Launch vehicles, Casmir watched the attack commence. On-screen, a cloud of dust erupted in the distance, followed by a muted blast and a rumbling that came through the ground. The Uglies were focusing on what they thought was the Universe Three spaceport, but they were wrong.
Thanks to Gregor Anderson’s prodding, U3 had used that “public” launch system for every routine operation they ran. But in their earliest months here, he and Casmir had agreed to dig this alternate launch pad. It had taken three years, much deception, and greater expense than many thought wise, but today that preparation was paying for itself a million times over. If his mission planners were right, UG controllers would see the carnage their bombing run had created and would interpret the relative lack of U3 response as an indicator that their mission had been successful.