Ephialtes (Ephialtes Trilogy Book 1)

by Parker, Gavin E

“You always have that, and you know it.”

  “I do Lewis, good night.”

  “Good night Askel. I’m going to look out the window and see if I can see you. My own little star in the night sky.”

  Askel hung up.

  While Askel had been working on Ephialtes Adam Speight had been overseeing the refits on Otus. Otus was a week ahead of Ephialtes. As lead designer Askel had been tied up making plans before she could leave. Speight had left for Otus almost immediately and had begun work on tearing down the chemical engines and the fuel store areas. Otus was the newer of the two ships and had only been in service for a matter of weeks. In some ways that made her easier to work on. There was still some snagging going on and the crew had yet to settle into their routines. They were easier to disrupt and didn’t quite yet have the sense that it was their ship that Speight was messing with. He was fast, too. He lacked a little of Askel’s imagination but he made up for it with ruthless application. Like a terrier he would worry away at any job and not let go until it was done.

  Speight’s data was mixed in to Askel’s from Ephialtes. The two ships were virtually identical, with only minor differences. Small problems that came to light on Otus could be avoided on Ephialtes, where those systems had yet to be implemented.

  Although Askel had never worked closely with Speight she knew of his high standing at Helios. He was known to be thorough and had something of a reputation for ruthlessness. Like Askel, he had risen rapidly at the company. Unlike Askel, he had left some bad feelings in his wake. To some it seemed he had climbed to the top over the bodies of those he’d used to get there.

  Askel hadn’t chosen Speight for the Otus job. He was Rawls’ choice. Rawls was a good judge of character and although he disliked Speight on a personal level he knew that he was a great choice for this job, which required absolute attention, diligence and perseverance. Some feelings might get hurt along the way; so be it.

  Askel had had daily briefings from Speight, mostly in the form of messages, but occasionally she would have to make contact via video link to discuss specific issues in depth. She didn’t mind his curt manner and slightly aloof air. In fact, it made things easier for her. There was no time wasted on the social niceties; they could get straight down to discussing the important matters at hand. That suited Askel. For these few months she wasn’t about making friends or sustaining relationships. She was strictly business, so Speight’s manner was fine with her.

  On this particular evening he had called early. They had scheduled the conversation to take place at 20:00 but he called at 19:40. Askel was sitting at her terminal tweaking a subsystem of the navigation software. She took the call.

  “Askel, I’ve sent you the data from our test burn earlier today. All looks good to me, can you give it the once over and get it back to me?”

  “I’m doing that right now, it should be back to you within the hour.”

  “Good. How about the navigation software? We might be in a position within the next ten days or so for a run out to the Moon. Would it be ready for that?”

  “Maybe. I’m working on that now, too. If you need to go to the Moon just go. The current system will handle it just fine.”

  “But if we have the new software we can test that, as well as the engine.”

  “I know. But the engine is the priority.”

  “Anything else for me?”

  “Will you be doing a full burn on the Moon trip?”

  “Not a full burn, it would be too much. About point five for a free return.”

  “No braking?”

  “Not yet. You think we should?”

  “Maybe not. The data from a point five burn will be incredibly useful.”

  “It will. It will tell us everything we need to know. We can extrapolate the data to a virtual full burn.”

  “Okay.”

  “Speight out.”

  Askel didn’t have time to say goodbye. As he spoke Speight had lent towards the terminal and tapped the screen to end the conversation.

  Steiner, Foley and Johnson had been in the refectory watching the streams from Mars when news of Venkdt’s election to the Martian presidency had come through. Johnson had immediately thrown a cupcake towards the screen. “Get off my damned planet,” he had said, to laughter from the others.

  “That fella needs an ass-whooping,” said Foley, “and I mean to give it to him.”

  Steiner slapped Foley’s back. “Politics by other means, my friend,” he said, “and we are most certainly other means. In fact, we’re one mean other means.”

  “What are you talking about, fool?” said Johnson.

  “I’m talking about our upcoming debate with Mr Venkdt there,” said Steiner. “He’ll be using ten dollar words and we’ll be using plasma rifles. Should be an interesting discussion.”

  “I’m not debating nothin’ with that fool,” said Johnson. “I just want to kick his ass for being un-American. I can’t even stand to look at his face,” he said as he launched another cake.

  “You trying to feed him to death?” said Steiner.

  “Can’t stand to look at the fool,” said Johnson, “that’s all it is.”

  “I appreciate the sentiment,” said Steiner, “but can you throw your own food instead of mine? I’m still hungry.”

  “Hungry? You should be honoured I’m throwing your food. It’s your patriotic duty. You’re always thinking of yourself, Steiner. How about giving something up for Uncle Sam?”

  “I’ve given Uncle Sam plenty. The cakes are mine.”

  Johnson gave him a sideways look. “I never trusted you, man,” he said in mock seriousness. “Anyone who puts his love of cakes over the love of his country is suspect to me. Maybe I should kick your ass before I kick his,” he said, nodding towards the screen. The streams moved on to some other news and Steiner, Foley and Johnson went back to their eating.

  They had been training now for weeks. They had spent hour upon hour in the IVRs and as much time again physically training in the gym. The Martian template for the IVRs had been massively useful. The lower gravity had many effects which they hadn’t considered. The parabola of any ballistic weapon was a significantly different shape due to the lower gravity. It took a long time to get used to their munitions acting differently. Atmospheric pressure was much lower on the Martian surface too, again affecting their shells and missiles. They had to relearn the way they aimed. The command drones themselves were a little sprightlier in Martian simulation since, in effect, they were nearly two-thirds lighter than they would be on the surface of the Earth.

  Though it seemed difficult at first (Johnson in particular was worried that he was unlearning many years’ worth of highly commodifiable experience) they had settled in to the Martian training and now felt as comfortable fighting on the surface of the virtual Mars as they had on the battlefields of Earth. Venkdt Corporation had provided very detailed models of their facilities on Mars and their own brass had provided many scenarios for them to train in.

  They had trained at capturing Venkdt facilities on the surface of the planet. Some of the remote facilities were comprised of just a few buildings. Capturing them consisted mostly of walking up to them and finding a way in. Threatening the personnel with massive armed violence and persuading them to allow access seemed to be a very successful tactic in these scenarios.

  Venkdt facilities in the big conurbation of Marineris could be captured the same way. Here there was more scope for demonstrating firepower. They knew which facilities should be unmanned and they had scanners to help confirm empty buildings. Such buildings could then be spectacularly destroyed, concentrating the minds of the enemy.

  At first they had run simulations as close to what they were expecting as possible, which was absolutely no armed resistance. There was a security service on Mars but their arms were limited to rifles and pistols. Compared to the armoury available to a commander that might as well have been no arms at all. After a few weeks of training the exercises all seemed to boil
down to the same thing; wandering up to the target, being threatening, and then being let in the front door.

  Part of the ethos of the Commander Program was to be ready for anything. Anticipating the unexpected and exploring every possible avenue the enemy may pursue against you was ingrained into every commander. As such, and at least in part to relieve the boredom, they had recently begun running simulations with a well-armed Martian resistance. These simulations had proved more of a challenge, but not by much. They had been useful because they had forced the commanders to think more tactically about their approaches and to focus more closely on the buildings and landscapes available to them. But the end result of these simulations had been the same; fast and total victory.

  All the hours of training in the IVRs had taught them some fundamentals about what to expect on Mars when they arrived in theatre. It had taught them that the atmosphere and gravity on Mars were not the same as they were on Earth. It had taught them to adjust their aim to compensate for the limited resistance and weaker pull of gravity. It had given them intimate knowledge of the layout of some of the buildings they might be likely to attack. But most of all it had taught them that victory would be fast and total. That much they did not question.

  Steiner was casually destroying a warehouse when his simulation was interrupted by a message from Soward.

  “All commanders, please stop your simulations.”

  Steiner stopped immediately but Soward paused for a few seconds. He assumed others, perhaps at more complex moments in their simulations, had needed time to finish up.

  “All commanders please be advised that we will be shipping out for Ephialtes and Otus this coming Saturday at 06:00 hours.”

  Steiner spoke into his com, which was patched through to Foley and Johnson. “Get some!” he said.

  “Squads A through G are assigned to Ephialtes. Squads H through N are going to Otus. Make sure you have your shit squared away and are ready to pull out first thing Saturday morning. That is all.” Soward’s voice disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.

  “Up and away,” Foley’s voice came over the com.

  “Do we get a pass between now and then?” said Johnson. “Once we’re up there a pass ain’t gonna do us any good. And we’re gonna be up there for months.”

  “Up to Connor, I guess,” said Steiner.

  “That’s a no then,” said Foley.

  “Damn!” said Johnson. “I need my pass. I’m nearly stir crazy from being in this place. God knows what it’s gonna be like up there. I need a pass. We all need a pass, any fool know that.”

  Steiner began to climb out of his IVR unit. “So we’ve got Ephialtes,” he said, “and a free trip to Mars thrown in too.” He had just finished climbing down the ladder when Foley opened his hatch.

  “I heard it’s pretty nice up there,” he shouted down. “A friend of mine said it’s like a five star hotel. Though I doubt he’s ever actually been in a five star hotel. Anyways, he said it was pretty good.”

  “That’s right,” said Steiner, “it’s a good gig, or it was. The guys we’re replacing just had to float around the world playing pool and watching videos, waiting for the phone to ring, which it was never going to. It might be comfortable but we’ve got a very different mission. We’re covering the best part of a billion miles and we might have to do some actual fighting somewhere along the way.”

  “Bullshit,” said Foley. “This is just a policing action. Think of it like an ocean cruise. And anyway, we’ve just done the hard part.” He slapped the side of his IVR twice. “From now on it will be piña coladas all the way to Mars and back. And on double pay, too.”

  Johnson was also clambering down. “You’re a damn fool, you know that, don’t you?” he said to Foley. “There ain’t no easy jobs in the army. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was some sort of a set up. Like they’ve got some other plan for us once we get there. No easy jobs in the army.”

  “It must be tiring being so jaundiced all the time,” said Steiner. “You need to get into the party mood like me and Foley here. If you’re just going to be grumpy the whole time we might not even take you with us.”

  “That’s funny, fool,” said Johnson, “but I’m telling you the army don’t do nothing the easy way, and there ain’t no easy jobs in the army. If you two think this is going to be an easy tour then I just about know for sure that’s exactly what it ain’t gonna to be. I need a pass.”

  They walked together towards the changing area.

  “What would you do with a pass anyway,” said Steiner, “meet up with the local crochet circle?”

  “You know exactly what I’d do, friend,” said Johnson, “and it don’t involve no goddamned crochet.”

  “So, Ephialtes,” said Foley, absentmindedly.

  “Ephialtes,” repeated Steiner. “That’s going to be home for the next few months.”

  “I like the sound of it,” said Foley. “It kind of rolls off the tongue, Ephialtes.”

  “Sounds like a bullshit name to me,” said Johnson. “I like them proper names, like Vengeance or Predator or Invincible. That’s the sort of thing a warship should be called.”

  “I don’t know,” said Steiner. “Ephialtes. Sounds good to me.”

  C H A P T E R 1 7

  Aggressive Expansion

  Kostovich had incredible amounts of data relating to the USAN’s military capability and equipment. He had taken their missile technology and adapted it into a system that was suitable for Mars and could be built quickly and cheaply. That system was well on the way to production. Parts were being fabricated and assembled already. Four designated sites had been selected north, east, south and west of the city and they were being prepared to accept the installations. Building contractors were laying the foundations to Kostovich’s precise specifications. They would start taking the prefabricated units of the missile batteries as soon as they were ready. They would be ready soon.

  The system was run remotely, controlled by software distributed around the Martian network. It was very resistant to cyber-attack. The physical system was somewhat resistant through redundancy; its four separate geographical locations covered widely overlapping areas. Each battery, to some degree, covered the others and they all covered the main Martian city of Marineris.

  Unlike Askel Lund, Kostovich was hands off in his overseeing of the building of his great defence system. He made the plans, which were precise and exquisitely detailed, then fired them off to engineers, builders and subcontractors. He kept his mind very much in the theoretical space and left the real world to others.

  As soon as plans were completed for the planetside missile batteries Kostovich turned his attention to the orbiting platform. The missile batteries on the planet were basically scaled down versions of plans stolen from the USAN. The orbiting platform, however, was different. For this one he had to design the platform from start to finish. He had set his AIs to the task and had overseen what they produced. He made tweaks and suggestions and read them back into the AIs and refined them again and again. The platform had to be designed such that the separate parts could be transported into orbit and assembled there. That made the task more difficult, but Kostovich and his AIs had found a way. The final design required more than six launches and major construction in orbit. For this Kostovich had adapted one of the USAN’s designs for an advanced construction drone. Two of these would be charged with assembling the prefabricated parts.

  Fabrication of the orbiting missile platform parts had taken many weeks and there were further delays due to the limited number of available flights into orbit. But it was coming together now. The orbiting platform was actually starting to look like an orbiting platform rather than disparate lumps of metal floating in roughly similar orbits. As ever, Kostovich observed from afar. He gave extensive notes to the contractors charged with making them a reality. Everything was proceeding well.

  With the missile batteries project in hand Kostovich was able to turn his attention to the smaller items o
n his to-do list. He had been charged with arming a new army. Not only a new army, but a new army in a circumstance previously unknown to human warfare. He had picked through the USAN’s designs and decided on a few fundamental pieces of equipment the army would need. Martian infantry would need a workhorse weapon that could be quickly and easily manufactured and used just as easily. For that, he selected the USAN plasma rifle. He made minimal tweaks, mainly due to the limited availability on Mars of some of the required precious metals. He found suitable substitutes. He thought a Martian army would need at least one form of armoured transport. By melding together two USAN designs he came up with an armoured troop carrier with a mounted plasma cannon. He tweaked the design of the cannon such that he doubled its power, making it a truly formidable weapon. Again, he streamlined the production process to make it easier to manufacture on Mars, and got his design to the fabrication plants as soon as possible.

  The uniform, he thought, needed to be light, practical and armoured. The USAN had very recently made some interesting advances in lightweight armour. He had looked at those and then integrated the armour design into a standard military battledress. He was working on the designs because of his technical knowledge and understood that the uniform, above all else, had to be a practical thing. However, as someone who had grown up playing IVR battle games he couldn’t resist tinkering with some of the cosmetic aspects of the uniform design. He gave the Martian battledress a subtle desert camouflage. The colours were rusty brown and a lighter brown, similar to the colours found on most of the Martian surface. He chose what he thought were impressive crests for various ranks. The crests contained long distance RFID identification markers so that any Martian troops could be instantly identified on the field of battle.

  His design for the Martian trooper’s helmet included a head-up display which overlaid real-time information on the world. The LDRFIDs constantly fed back to a huge battlefield model, which in turn fed the information back from the model to the troops on the field. This meant that, for example, a trooper on the field would be able to see all of his comrades, whether he had line of sight or not. If they walked behind a building his head-up display would superimpose exactly where they were over his vision of the real world, just as if he could see them through the building. All friendly troops, and where possible friendly buildings and civilians, would be marked as such by means of a faint green glow. Enemy structures, transports and troops would conversely be marked with a glowing red outline.