“I heard your outgoing brief,” she lets me know as she pops the hatch into Ops-3, the slightly roomier auxiliary command center on A-Deck directly under the actual Ops tower. She already has holo-maps pulled up on the tactical table in the middle of the room, which means we’re being spared the two deck ladder climb up into Ops-1, probably for the sake of expedience (or possibly she herself gets tired of going up and down ladders all the time). “Chang—if it is Chang—must know our effective scanning ranges. If he’s moving in this end of Coprates, he’s staying out of sight. But we could set up a series of listening posts between here and Melas Two to catch him if he passes between us.”
“I’d rather catch him creeping up on us,” I tell her. “Early warning. For whatever good it will do.”
“Big ship, big guns?” she gets to what I’ve been worried about. She highlights a few valley-floor pathways from Melas to Tranquility, then the estimated territory controlled by Aziz in southeast Melas.
“Too bad the traders weren’t more specific about where they had their close encounter,” she complains. “But these are our best guesses on the food routes: Given the likely timeframe, they would most likely have seen the mystery storm roughly between our bases.”
Then she points out the obvious blind spots: First, the big mountain range that runs between our bases, eventually merging with the South Rim of Coprates, dividing it from the much narrower Coprates Catena. The Catena’s chain of collapsed canyons would make a good hiding spot: unstable, prone to slides, but narrow and shear-walled, with tight “choke points” in several spots along its length, making it easy to defend and disappear into. This had been a likely choice for the location of the Discs’ “home base” pre-Apocalypse, allowing them to get in and out of Melas, or creep up on the Coprates colony sites, without being detected. The crenellated Catena would mask them from radar. And that’s exactly why Melas Three was build here, covering the exit out of the Catena.
But the food routes (we assume) go to Tranquility, on the South Rim of the main canyon—there would be no reason for the traders to enter the Catena—so the storms would have been seen in Coprates proper.
“The Coprates Catena Range effectively blocks our view of the main canyon,” she points out the obvious frustration, “we’d have to put sensors up on the crest.” Then she points to the short range of mountains southeast of Melas Two. “And these block your view of the straightest route to Tranquility—we’d need sensors up in both these heights. Otherwise, he could pass between us, slide up on Melas Two from the south-southeast. He could get within twenty klicks of you before you see him, come at you over the mountains.”
She’s been working this out since I made my call to Richards.
“Chang’s probably thinking that very thing,” I admit darkly. “Or one of his local cronies figured it for him.”
“We have a painfully big blind spot,” she doesn’t soothe.
“Same problems we had with the Discs,” I remember.
“But back then, we positioned these bases assuming we had satellites and were running regular air patrols,” she criticizes.
“Being out in the middle of Coprates—keeping between the ranges—might keep him out of sight of the ETE as well,” I calculate. One more call I have to make.
“It could be more than just being able to jump us,” she thinks it further. “It may also be about better real estate—especially if he’s not afraid of the locals. And didn’t the Stilsons say something about a PK colony out that way?”
“Eureka,” I remember.
Lisa’s Operations Officer—Lieutenant Petersen—lets us know we’ve got incoming from Richards.
“Message received.”
And that’s it.
“He doesn’t want to risk Chang hearing us,” I decide.
“It’d be nice to know what he has in mind,” Lisa grouses.
“Looks like we have to trust,” I try to sound optimistic.
I call Mark Stilson back and tell him what we’ve calculated. Like Richards, he’s vague about his response, just thanks us for the intel.
I decide to stick around for awhile, and Lisa puts us up in a spare pilot’s quarters. Melas Three is even more submarine-like than Melas Two. The “room” is five-by-eight, most of that taken up by a stack of narrow bunks. At least it has an attached bathroom (though it’s barely big enough to sit down in without banging your knees). The rolled-steel walls echo, adding to the ship-at-sea effect.
Sakina and I manage to make do wedged into the bottom bunk. Our intimacy has become more and more urgent lately, desperate, as if we both fear time may be short. It would almost be romantic if the danger wasn’t looming so oppressively. And I realize I’ve chosen to spend the night because I don’t want my men—or Lisa—hung out this vulnerable if I’m not at least willing to share their exposure.
28 December, 2116:
Anton and his team cobble together a half-dozen small sensor stations to plant on high ground. A morning’s run with our last ASV gets them planted up on the Catena Divide and on the mountains southeast of Melas Two. They also help with signal strength back and forth between our bases.
Feeling like we’ve at least got some kind of early warning system, I take the return flight back to Melas Two.
“Spectators,” Smith points out as we’re headed over the mountains. Two ETE ships are hovering west of us, just within visual range, as if running their own patrols of the passage between Coprates and Melas.
“We could use the…” I start to say. And then the ship gets rattled by a massive shockwave. There’s a deafening sound of thunder. Ahead of us, the sky is filled by a geyser of dirt and rock, shooting hundreds of feet upward, at least a hundred feet wide.
“What the hell…?” Smith tries, quickly turning our nose away from the apparent blast.
“Missile?” I guess. But it didn’t sound like a warhead. Sakina stares through the plexi at all the flying dirt, frozen.
“One of our sensors was in there somewhere,” Smith confirms the loss. Then: “Incoming. Friendlies.”
The ETE ships are moving in.
“Colonel Ram to ETE flights. We are intact. You might want to back away until we can determine what just happened,” I try to warn them off.
I hear something that sounds easily supersonic cutting the air, followed by another thunderclap, only nowhere near as loud as the last one.
“Behind us!” Smith locates, turning the ship to give us a look. A similar blast plume has been thrown up out of the Catena Divide.
“It looks like a meteorite strike,” Anton comes over the Link.
“We lost another sensor,” Smith confirms.
“Get us out of here,” I order Smith. “Get low.”
“You need to see this, Colonel…” Anton sends me videos of the first blast: one from a distance that must have been from the Catena cameras, and another much closer—marked as our ASV nose cam. The mountaintop erupts—like demolition, or a caldera explosion. He rolls it back, slows it way down, highlights: I can see something fly in very fast, visibly rippling the air as it passed, impacting the mountainside with unbelievable kinetic energy. Like a meteorite. Only the trajectory is horizontal.
Video of the second hit looks very similar. MAI runs some quick calculations of the projectiles’ speeds and trajectories. Speed for both was pushing Mach 10. The trajectories are amazingly flat, and coming from somewhere east in Coprates.
“I’m not reading propellant in the trail,” Rick comes on. “And the blast doesn’t look like a chemical explosive. It doesn’t look like an explosive at all. Captain Smith called it: it looks like a meteorite strike, all kinetic energy.”
Smith is burning fuel hard, circling us around the western tip of the mountains, putting them between us and whatever’s in Coprates that’s capable of throwing Mach 10 projectiles.
“ETE ships, you need to back out and get low,” I warn again, seeing that both Guardian aircraft have hesitated, hanging in the air in the middle of the val
ley between the two blasted mountain ranges. “Whatever’s shooting at us…”
I hear the air crack again. One of the ETE ships lights up, its shields flaring as it gets swatted backwards. And bursts…
“GET OUT OF THERE!!” I’m yelling at them.
“Holy shit…” is all Smith can say, as bits of the shattered ship rain down onto the valley floor.
“It hit them hard enough to penetrate their shields,” Rick describes the obvious, his playback showing it happen in ultra slow motion. The otherwise invisible spherical shield around the ship goes white-hot as the projectile hits it, then deforms a soft rubber ball, punched inward. Or shot. Whatever hit it still has enough energy to blow right through the ship from nose to tail, blasting it apart. Vaporizing it.
“Fuck…” Anton tries to comprehend what we’re seeing. “Jesus fuck…”
The other ship hesitates, then turns, retreats, weaving to make a more difficult target. Leaving their fellows—alive or dead (and I doubt even an ETE could have survived that)—behind.
“I’m suddenly grateful we have these mountains blocking our view,” Rick says breathlessly as we put the slopes between our ship and the devastation.
“Any idea what the hell that was?” Smith still wants to know. Sakina is looking at me for any kind of useful answer.
“I think it was a rail gun,” Rick finally concludes, sounding shaky.
Rick and Anton have a full presentation ready by the time we land and get up to Ops. Lisa’s on Link, as is Mark Stilson, looking more shaken than I’ve ever seen him.
“How many people did you have on that ship?” I ask first.
“Five,” he says gravely. “Guardian Patrol from Red Station. Jonah Carter was piloting. There has been no transmission yet from survivors. Green Station is sending a rescue party, but they’ll be going into the pass without a ship. Hopefully that will deny Chang an easy target.”
“Please let us know what they find.”
He nods heavily, and doesn’t seem to have anything else to say on the matter. I turn things over to Anton and Rick.
“We think it was a rail gun,” Anton starts. “No propellant, no explosive. Just a conductive projectile accelerated along parallel rails by a massive amount of electrical current. Range can be hundreds of miles. Does all its damage just with kinetic energy. A relatively small projectile—maybe a few kilos—hits harder than a conventional cruise missile. It’s very much like a meteorite strike.”
“Makes for cheap and easy ammo,” Rick half-praises. “Downsides are high, though: It needs a ridiculous amount of power, enough to run a colony or two. And it generates a lot of heat and friction. Versions I’ve seen usually fail after a few uses, assuming they don’t tear themselves apart on the first shot.”
“And anyone with infrared scanning can see the thing lit up like an open blast furnace,” Anton offers.
“Trajectory calculations put the weapon approximately here,” I get to something more tactically pressing, pointing to an area in the valley just past Tranquility.
“Chang could control the entire Coprates Chasma,” Stilson concludes, his anger finally starting to bleed through his practiced stoicism.
“And anything in central Melas he has a straight shot at,” Rick makes it worse. “The mountains are protecting our bases. And your Stations.”
MAI adds potential firing lines to the map.
“For the moment only. He’s got it on a flying platform,” I have to point out the obvious. And MAI shows us new firing lines. Assuming just lateral movement, he could target this base from the east. If he moved into Melas proper, he’d have a shot at everything—Stations, bases, colony sites…
“He needed the big ship to support the power source, and to make it mobile,” Anton comes to the cold realization.
“He could fire that thing into orbit,” Rick adds to it grimly. “He could shoot down anything Earth sends.”
“Then we need to take it away from him,” Stilson concludes, almost sounding like he’s describing a misbehaving child.
An hour later—an hour spent with Kastl staring at our still-limited radar screens, which thankfully (or frustratingly) show no activity—we get another cryptic reply from General Richards.
“Your recent intelligence is being analyzed. I regret to say that any countermeasures we could generate from our end will be at least a year or more from delivery. You are on your own. My only consolation to you is that your resupply is on schedule for arrival January 17th. While it contains nothing that could help you in this situation, you may be able to do some good with it in a larger sense, spread some goodwill to the locals. God be with you all, and please know, Colonel, that I have the same faith in you that my grandfather did. Message ends.”
“Huh,” Kastl comments after a few moments, then checks something with MAI. “That’s odd, Colonel. The General said January 17th. I just rechecked the tracking. We should see our drops hit orbit by the fourteenth.”
It’s almost worth a smile.
Chapter 7: Hero’s Death
17 January 2117:
He comes as expected, minutes after dawn on the appointed day, the cloud that cloaks his vessel effectively blotting out the rising sun, as if telling us he can stop our tomorrow.
But his cloak makes him easy to see coming up on us—no morning blow looks like the swirling wall of sand he throws up. That, and the intense EMR signature in the center of it lit up the discreet sensors we dropped on its likely approach routes. They tagged him when he got within 50 klicks of the base, coming in from the east-southeast. (Even if that was all we had, it was still plenty of warning to get ourselves ready for him.)
The display is only one more proof that Chang is more about show than tactical practicality. And I wonder if it’s for our benefit or something else to impress his army of power-blind dupes. The only thing the thick storm cloud does do effectively is not let us get a good look at whatever he’s built. And then he doesn’t let us see at all.
We all hold position while he repeats his last opening move: bringing his ship in close enough that our Links get knocked out by his EMR bleed. This also blows his artificial storm over our bunkers. And that much is smart: Launching a ship of our own would be risky, both blind and deaf (assuming we had one here in any condition to launch, a deficit he may not realize). And any visual coordination of our ground forces or remaining batteries is impossible in the thick haze. He could open fire with his big gun and finish us, or at least do catastrophic damage to the base before we could respond. Or he could launch his own ground assault, destroy our surface guns and attempt to breach our locks to take the base.
But as expected, he doesn’t do any of those things. He’s arrogant. He prefers to posture, to intimidate. So he throws away his advantage, lets his dust screen fade as the dawn sun purples the sky, rising behind him through his residual haze. He wants us to see him. He wants us to see what he’s made.
His ship is a monolithic shadow at first: a huge cross-shape, all hard angles that begins to look more and more like a flying junkyard as our view of it gets clearer. From below, it’s an array of massive slabs and blocks. Its sides are bristling with a variety of guns, many probably salvaged from the stripped Zodanga and Frontier colonies. From some of our more distant views, its topside sprouts squat towers fore and central, while the aft and wings look to be flat flight decks.
Moored by lines on either side is a Zodangan dirigible, though these models look stripped down to basics: no sails, just fans. (Rapidly constructed, or an attempt to reduce vulnerability?) Their undersides are hung thick with “kite” fighters. Still, they look especially fragile next to the big hovering hulk. He must be assuming that all we have left is a few guns and sparse ammo for them, the way he’s giving us a spread of targets he expects is too big to hope to take down. Again, it’s the same play he used last time, only grander.
As the dust slowly clears, we can see that the main ship is all patchwork welding, with chunks of it still featuring colonia
l markings and paint. It looks like a trash sculpture, but it’s as big as a small aircraft carrier.
Still more show than strategy, he brings his flying display in close, daring us to shoot first, confident we won’t dare. He finally stops not two hundred meters east of our pads and less than thirty meters off the deck.
There’s a conspicuous rectangular maw in the bow of his flagship, which is likely the “muzzle” of his rail gun. It must run much of the length of his main hull, mostly protected under a massive amount of metal, but there seems to be no means to turn or elevate it, and that says he must have to maneuver his entire ship to aim the thing. And the cargo-bay-door-sized muzzle is a potential vulnerability in a powerful but probably fragile weapon.
All communications offline, I play my own show. The crew elevator raises me up to pad-level as the morning winds blow the remaining dust cloud away. With me is Sakina and Rios, the latter only in his LAs and a mask, hopefully presenting a formal but harmless-looking delegation. The fact that we aren’t fired upon partially reassures me that Chang is in the mood to talk, or at least to threaten. But we stand there in the wind for several tense minutes with no acknowledgement, looking up at the flying fortress hovering motionless just off our perimeter. (I’m sure Chang is doing this intentionally, letting us sweat as we appreciate his creation.)
Finally, a bright light slices straight down under his ship, making a circle on the dirt just big enough for us to stand in glow. The effect is very UFO abduction cheesy, but we get the hint and cautiously move forward, stepping off the pad deck, down the reinforcing berm of rock (and trying not to slip during such an auspicious moment), and out into the shadow of his ship. Into the light.
The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds Page 34