Semper Mars (18 page)

The real prize, however, was contributed by Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky. When the UN troops had broken into the women’s quarters, she’d managed to slip a Ruger-K Defender, a 2mm fléchette pistol, up inside her T-shirt. The Ruger was a tiny weapon—the sort of personal defense holdout weapon known as a pocket pistol—and could be concealed in a woman’s hand; throughout the ordeal at Cydonia, even when she’d been forced to keep her hands behind her head, she’d managed to hold her elbows in such a way that she’d kept the weapon held snugly in place between her rather generous breasts.

The Ruger wasn’t much of a weapon. Each of the five caseless sabot rounds in its magazine housed three 2mm fléchettes, deadly enough against an unprotected human if fired into throat or face at point-blank range, but useless against armor or even the protection afforded by a leather jacket, and next to useless at a range of more than a few meters. But it was something, at least. A beginning.

“Okay,” Garroway said, dropping his voice to a whisper barely audible above the racket. “We have one ranged weapon, and that’s close-up only. We’ve got to figure out a plan. How can we get in close enough to use it?”

“Make them come in here?” Jacob asked.

“Ah, they’d be stupid to do that,” Knox replied. “At least, all at once. And we’re gonna have to surprise all of ’em quick, so they can’t radio for help.”

“We’re gonna need to sneak up on the sons of bitches,” Ostrowsky pointed out quietly. “That could be tough. They’ll have heat sensors in the cat.”

“Yeah,” Knox said, nodding. “Especially since we’ll have to make our move at night. Our Class-Ones are pretty good at scattering heat plumes, but we’re still gonna show up like torches if we go out there in the middle of the night, when the ambient temp’s down to something like 150 below.”

“Why do you say we’ll have to move at night, Gunny?” Garroway said, thoughtful. “Well, we sure as hell can’t walk out there in broad daylight…”

‘‘I’m wondering about that.” Garroway reached out and flicked his forefinger against Knox’s torso armor, eliciting a hollow thump.

“You’re thinking it’ll be easier to mask our heat signatures out there at high noon,” Ostrowsky whispered.

Garroway nodded. “Affirmative. We’re close to the equator. Midday temperatures here can get up to a few degrees below freezing… or even higher. Thermal sensors work by comparing the contrast between the background temperature and what’s being scanned.”

“These tin suits still give off a hell of a lot of heat,” Lieutenant King pointed out. “It’s their main weakness. Besides, even their active camouflage won’t provide a perfect blend with the environment, especially if we’re moving.’’

“Well, there may be a way around that,” Garroway said. “What we need to work out is a way to take down that Mars cat… and to do it before the bad guys can radio an alarm back to Bergerac…”

2158 Hours GMT

Heinlein Station, Mars

0935 hours MMT

“There’s no more time for discussion,” Alexander said quietly. “We’re going to do it.”

It was quieter now in the hab, though there was still an echoing murmur of people talking. Alexander had gathered the other archeologists about the plastic table at the center of the big room for a quiet, hurried discussion.

Significantly, it was the same group that had been with him yesterday when he’d discovered the vault and the mummified bodies—Dr. Craig Kettering, of Penn State; Dr. Devora Druzhininova, from the Russian Academy of Science; Edward Pohl, on extended loan from the Field Historical Research Foundation in Chicago; and Louis Vandemeer, from the Smithsonian. Everyone who’d actually seen the fmd had been packed off to this out-of-the-way outpost… probably on the assumption that if Graves and the rest of the US and Russian scientists could be kept out of the site, no one would be able to file a detailed report with Earth. Possibly they planned on manipulating those still at Cydonia, in order to suppress the find.

Suppress the find. His find. The knowledge that they were covering up his discovery, and the resultant frustration and anger, burned in his stomach and in his throat. It was happening again, danm it. He’d found a tiny crack in the wall that hid the past, just enough to let one slender shaft of light pass through and illuminate a piece of the Truth… and they were troweling the crack shut just as quickly as they could manage.

“We can’t, Dave,” Kettering said, “Don’t you see? This could cause a war, a shooting war, right here on Mars! Remember what happened to the Sphinx? Napoleon?” The French invasion of Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century had been both a boon and a curse to archeologists. It had uncovered the Rosetta Stone and introduced Europe to the glories of Egypt’s lost civilization.

At the same time, soldiers had shot off the nose of the Sphinx with a cannon, apparently just for fim.

“I can’t lend my support to this,” Vandemeer added, shaking his head. “It’s just danmed irresponsible!”

“‘Call me… irresponsible…’” Druzhininova sang lightly, as though trying to ease the black tension hanging above the table. She had a thing for Western music, they all knew. Then she grew serious. “David is right, guys. By the time these people get done, we may never be able to figure out what the story is at Cydonia.”

“But… what would be the point?” Vandemeer wanted to know. “They just want to make sure other countries have access to the technology we find. And, as for the, uh, discovery yesterday, it sounds to me like they’re just concerned that, uh, sensitive information might be released too quick, maybe give fanatics the wrong idea. All they want is a responsible approach…”

“Responsible my ass!” Alexander snapped. “I understand their concern, but so far we haven’t found a hell of a lot we can use. Learning anything at all is going to take all of the resources of Earth for, for, I don’t know, centuries, maybe, before we can make much out of it. And as for the discovery, it seems to me that they’re not giving ordinary people credit for even a little common sense.”

“The fanatics’ll make what they want out of things,” Pohl said, “whether we provide the fuel or not.”

“That’s right,” Alexander said. “Don’t you see, Van? What we found out there says some profound things about who we are, where we came from. Things we’ve got to know! These bastards could scramble things so badly we may never get at the truth!”

“I’d like to know where these people get off setting themselves up as the arbiters of the dissemination of information,” Druzhininova said.

“It’s worse than what happened to me in Cairo,” Alexander said. All of them were familiar with his expulsion from Egypt in ’37, and the reasons behind it. “If we let them get away with this—”

“Are you sure,” Vandemeer interrupted quietly, “that you’re not just worried about your chances for publication?”

Alexander lunged to his feet, overturning his lightweight, plastic chair and nearly knocking the table aside. “You take that back!”

Druzhininova put her hand on Alexander’s shoulder. “Easy, Dave.”

Pohl stepped between him and Vandemeer. “Yeah, Dave. We’re all in this together, right?”

“I’m not so sure about that,” he said, his eyes still locked with Vandemeer’s. He shook himself as the others released him. “I’ll try to forget you said that, Vandemeer. But you hear me, and hear me good. You too, Craig.”

“David…” Druzhininova began.

“It’s okay, Devora.” He kept his voice low and level. “If you two guys want to sit here and rot for the next three months, you’re free to do so. But our military friends here are working out a way to block the UN bastards, and I’m going to help them every damned way that I can. If that means giving me a gun and charging that Mars cat out there, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m sick of being shoved around, told what I can’t dig, or told what I can’t say, and I’m not going to sit still for it any longer, understand me?”

The odd part about it all was, Alexander still wasn’t sure what he thought of this whole idea. He still hated the military… the regimentation, the spit and polish, the regulations, the dehumanization, all the aspects of military life that had grated on him when he was growing up as a Navy brat in Charleston, Pensacola, Portsmouth, Roosey Roads, and all of those other bases and stations scattered up and down the East Coast of America where he’d lived until his father had been killed. The thought that he was now voluntarily helping a bunch of US Marines was as startling personally as the find beneath the sands of Cydonia the day before… something that couldn’t be, but was.

But he was going to follow through with the one, if that was what it took to uncover the truth about the other.

“I think you’re making a mistake,” Vandemeer said, “but it’s nothing worth fighting over.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Louis,” Alexander told him. “The truth is always worth fighting for.”

T
HIRTEEN

Sunday, 27 May: 2308 Hours GMT

Heinlein Station, Mars

Sol 5636: 1045 hours MMT

“So, you got your lines down?” Garroway asked. It was crowded in the hab’s single, small airlock, with seven Marines and several bundles of equipment. “It’s show time!”

“I’ll have ’em eating out of my hand, Major,” Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky replied. “Just so you keep them drooling long enough for us to pull this off,” he replied. “Hey, not a problem,” she replied, laughing.

He couldn’t share her exuberant, almost cocky enthusiasm. There was too much at stake here, and far too many things could go wrong.

Ostrowsky was wearing one of the civilian archeologist’s space suits. The name on the chest read DRUZHININOVA. It had been her idea, actually, and Devora Druzhininova had gone along with it. The Marines’ helmet visors were nearly opaque with the HUD displays up. The civilian suits were lighter, and they sported goldfish bowl helmets that were transparent save for a slight blue tint to screen out the ultraviolet.

It meant that the UN troops inside the Mars cat would be able to see that Ostrowsky was a woman. An attractive woman, buzz cut and all.

Sex, as Ostrowsky had reminded him, always sells.

The airlock’s pressure matched the air pressure outside, and a red light winked on overhead. “Okay, radio silence, everyone,” Garroway said. The hab walls would block the relatively weak UHF transmissions of their suits, but once they were outside the enemy would be listening to them. Turning, he touched the outer-hatch control. The door popped open, and they stepped out into the crisp, red-gold clarity of the Martian surface.

The scene was breathtakingly beautiful, gold sand beneath a cloudless sky that was pink on the horizon, but shaded to a deep and empty ultramarine overhead. All seven Marines—Garroway and Ostrowsky, Caswell, Donatelli, Foster, Jacob, and Kaminski—made their way in single file out of the airlock and around to the side of the hab that partly blocked the line of sight to the Mars cat, some fifty meters away.

They’d made several trips out through the airlock already, lugging along the pieces of the big Westinghouse portable drill unit… and some other things, carefully hidden with the bundles of tubing, condensers, heating coils, and batteries. The drill was portable in name only, a device weighing half a ton that could be assembled in an hour or so and had power enough to drill through tens of meters of hard-packed sand to reach the icy permafrost layer below. Once a hole had been opened, drill tubing with a heated head was lowered to the bottom and the permafrost melted to a thick slurry of mud and water. Most of the water vaporized as it melted into near vacuum; collectors at the drill head captured the vapor and condensed it into liquid, which was pumped into storage tanks for later use.

Such drills were responsible for opening Mars to large-scale human operations like the bases at Candor and Cydonia; besides drinking water, they provided both oxygen and the hydrogen for converting atmospheric CO
₂
into the methane used by the shuttles. A wellhead had already been set up a few tens of meters to the north of the hab, but the Marines would be expected to start a new well right away; since all water on Mars was frozen, no one well site lasted more than a few days—a week at the most, depending on how many people were based at a given hab—and new wells had to be constantly sited and drilled.

The point was that the watchers would not find their work particularly suspicious. After a few moments, Ostrowsky left them, walking toward the cat with her arms out from the sides of her body, a white cloth in her right hand. “Hello!” she called. “You in the cat! Can we talk?” At least one person in the UN detail must speak English.

“Remain twenty meters from the vehicle,” a heavily accented voice replied over the general talk channel. “What do you want?”

“A ride out of here,” Ostrowsky replied. “For the women. I was wondering if we could strike a deal with you guys.”

“What kind of a deal?”

“No deal,” a second voice added. “We have our orders.”

“Oh. Come on,” Ostrowsky said. “You think us girls want to be locked up with these guys for the next three months?”

“You’re Marines,” the second voice replied. “Didn’t you just spend months cooped up with them on the cycler?”

“At least we had some privacy! We had our own head! Look, there’s gotta be something we can work out. If you could take us back to Mars Prime, maybe we could, I don’t know, make it worth your while, y’know?”

“Well, you’re going to have to be more explicit than that. Exactly what did you have in mind?”

“Well, gee, I don’t know.” Garroway could hear the slink in her voice, could imagine her shifting her hips in that lightweight EVA suit. “We could maybe work something out. But I gotta see you guys face-to-face if we’re going to negotiate. I don’t want… I mean, we’ve got people listening in, y’know?”

The other Marines continued their work, setting up the drilling rig’s legs and connecting the fuel-cell array to the motor. As the banter continued, Garroway nodded to the others. Caswell, Donatelli, and Foster continued assembling the drill, while Garroway, Jacob, and Kaminski moved to a point where they were screened by the rig and found the armor sections that were waiting for them.

Marine Class-One armor could be broken down into eighteen separate parts. One was the front half of the cuirass, a single curved piece of kinevlar that covered the chest and torso. Earlier, several Marines had brought the portable drilling unit out and set it up around at the back of the hab, opposite the structure from the watching Mars cat. They’d brought out three cuirass front halves with the rest of the drilling and collection equipment, and left them piled with other equipment on the cold, hard ground.

Momentarily out of sight of the cat and its crew, Garroway, Kaminski, and Jacob dropped flat to the sand, each of them taking one of the torso armor sections. With the armor propped up in front of them then, they began crawling clumsily across the sand.

Active camouflage was an effect created by the layer of memory plastic coating the metal, requiring only sunlight or a trickle of body heat to work. Lying flat on his stomach, Garroway kept the cuirass out in front of him, bracing it by wedging the bottom edge into the sand, and holding it upright with straps wound tightly about his gloved hands.

In a sense, it was a high-tech version of a very old device… the shield. By keeping the half of an armor torso shell out away from his body, he was blocking the heat signature of his own suit. A careful scan from the Mars cat would almost certainly pick up the heat plume rising above his body in the cold, thin air, but with Ostrowsky out there talking to them, he didn’t think they would be paying that much attention. The active camo on the outer surface, meanwhile, would blend in with the surrounding landscape. So long as he and the others moved slowly, without sudden jerks or movements, they stood a good chance of making it up close to the crawler unobserved.

“How many women are there?” another man’s voice said, as the radio conversation continued. The exchange would help the Marines keep track of what was going on inside the cat.

“Five,” Ostrowsky replied. “Four Marines and a civilian.”

“I don’t know,” the voice came back. “That’d make it mighty crowded in here.”

“Aw c’mon! You guys could think of something!…”

There were just two problems with this plan, one foreseen, the other a difficulty that Garroway hadn’t even thought of until he was on his belly and slowly inching toward the objective. The foreseen plan was the trouble he and the other three would have seeing their objective. They’d allowed for that by working out their choreography with Ostrowsky. She was to walk to a point twenty meters away from the crawler’s door; by keeping her in view and the crawler blocked by their shields, the strike team could close on the target even when they couldn’t see it.

The unforeseen problem was worse. Garroway had forgotten how fiendishly cold the surface of the Martian desert was. The air temperature stood now, according to the readout on his helmet HUD, at minus fourteen Celsius, but the ground, hard-packed sand and loose gravel, was still a literal deep freeze. His armor’s best insulation was on the soles of his boots, and the frigid ground seemed to leach the heat out through the front armor of his Class-Ones like a sponge soaking up a spill. He hadn’t been on his stomach for more than ten minutes before he started shivering inside his armor. He’d already taken the precaution of disabling the thermostat of the suits—there was no sense in giving the UN heat sensors an easy target—and within a very few minutes more, all three of the slowly advancing Marines would be in danger of frostbite, or worse.

What the hell am I doing here? he asked himself. There’d been plenty of volunteers for this assault… and the more he thought about it, the more he knew that the role he’d assumed should have been given to someone younger, tougher, and possessing faster reflexes. He was feeling old… and the feeling grew worse the closer he crawled toward the objective.

“We might be able to work something out at that,” a voice from the Mars cat said. “We’re supposed to pull out of here in a day or two. We might be able to find some room for you women at that. Maybe…”

“Well, okay,” Ostrowsky said. “Let me go in and talk to the other girls, okay?”

Ostrowsky had promised to keep the soldiers in the cat talking until the Marines in the assault team had crawled to within twenty meters of their objective. Now she was walking slowly back toward the hab.

Garroway was shivering hard now, as he angled around toward the rear of the Mars cat. The cat’s engine was in the rear, along with the radiators and waste-heat spills. From there, he and the others should be able to sprint the last few tens of meters to the vehicle without being picked up by its sensors… if they could rise from the icy sand and move now. Judging his position from the angle of the hab, he carefully lowered the shield, just enough to steal a glimpse of the Mars cat past its edge.

Right on target. He was looking straight on at the rear of the vehicle, from a distance of about fifteen meters.

There was still no indication that they’d been seen. Garroway looked about, checking the positions of the others.

Ostrowsky was clear. If they had anything on the ball, the UN troops would be searching the area for anything amiss… but with luck their IR scan wouldn’t pick up the three Marines in the heat shadow of their own power plant. Garroway waited… waited… watching for some overt reaction, and when there was none, he dropped the armor segment, scrambled to his feet, and sprinted forward.

His body was so cold it was more of a lumber than a sprint, but he covered those last few meters and sagged against the Mars cat’s starboard track. He spared a single glance for the hab, knowing that Lieutenant King was watching, was signaling the others to start the next phase of the plan. Working on the assumption that there were undiscovered listening devices still scattered about the hab’s interior, several of the Marines should now be starting to discuss what they were going to do to get rescued. They wouldn’t actually discuss anything; the idea wasn’t to have the UN guards radio for help, but to gather around their radio, trying to make out what the prisoners were saying.

And in the meantime, Garroway, Jacob, and Kaminski had reached the cat’s door.

Jacob was an electronics expert, like Garroway had been when he was an enlisted man. He held up his weapons—Radley’s pliers and one of the smuggled pocketknives—and nodded his readiness. Garroway held Ostrowsky’s fléchette gun… and hoped once again that he’d be able to work the thing if he had to. Even with the trigger guard removed, he was having trouble feeling anything at all through the fabric of his glove, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to manipulate the trigger.

With his other hand, he did a quick, three-fingered countdown, two… one…

Garroway hit the emergency airlock entry switch, which slid the outer door open immediately. Kaminski set one booted foot on the rung of the ladder going up the vehicle’s side, then scrambled up to the roof, where the small sat dish hung on its yoke, aimed almost directly straight up. A couple of quick turns on the locking release, and the satellite dish swung easily in its mounting, aiming uselessly at the horizon.

Jacob was the first into the airlock. Both he and Garroway had worked on Mars cats before, during their mission training on Earth and in simulation during the cycler passage. There was a maintenance access panel in the tiny compartment to the left, and in seconds Jacob had popped the cover and was wrist-deep in the wiring on the other side. Garroway braced himself in the airlock’s outer hatchway, Ostrowsky’s fléchette pistol aimed head high at the inner hatch, just in case somebody tried coming through. Overriding the airlock’s safeties, which prevented both hatches from being open to vacuum at once, was a relatively simple matter of cutting, stripping, and crossing four sets of wires, but the process took an eternity of seconds… and the UN troops on board would have known something was going down as soon as the outer hatch cracked open.

“C’mon!” Garroway said, keeping his eyes on the inner hatch. It was the first thing spoken since they’d left the shelter of the hab. “Damn it, c’mon!”

“Almost… got it… shit! Can’t feel… a thing… through these… damned gloves…” Kaminski dropped to the sand outside the airlock, Doc Casey’s knife at the ready.

“Here she goes!” Jacob yelled, and then the inner hatch was sliding away as a swiftly strengthening wind blasted out into the airlock. A swirl of loose paper and garbage followed—a couple of readymeal packets, some plastic wrapping, an empty memclip case—and then the hurricane was past and an armored figure with a light blue helmet was swinging into view, framed in the open hatch.

Garroway had been gambling that however many men there were aboard the Mars cat, most would not have their armor on. The stuff was bulky and uncomfortable and made such essential details as urination a tedious chore—or forced the wearer to wire himself up with uncomfortable plastic plumbing. Someone, at least, would be in armor at all times in case of an emergency… but the whole plan would go seriously wrong if several of them happened to have been wearing their suits.