Semper Mars (34 page)
“Roger that. Hold on. I have to grab some altitude.”
The lobber’s thrust increased briefly, boosting them higher. Below, he could see at least a dozen UN soldiers, fleeing their trench line and jogging north as fast as they could, leaving several bodies and a large number of weapons lying in the sand.
The Marines were swarming over the former enemy works now. Some of them were stopping to pick up discarded weapons; there’d not been enough to go around, of course, and some of the Marines had charged the UN works unarmed.
They all had weapons now, however, as they continued to pursue the Foreign Legion troops toward Cydonia Prime.
As the lobber began descending again, Knox saw a small mob clustered around the outside of the main hab’s airlock. Most of them, he thought, were UN troops caught in the earlier attack against the parked vehicles, trying to get back inside.
The mob was an easy target; a case of chemical bombs flung high over the cluster of running, armored men spilled its contents across them all. Explosions of bone-dry dust suddenly reacting to liquid water and alcohol, the sticky splash of rapidly gelling beer, the stark confusion of running men and panicked radio calls served to dissolve the last remnants of any unit cohesion the UN troops might have had.
1715 Hours GMT
UN Positions
Cydonia Prime
1430 hours MMT
Somebody collided with Dutetre from behind, knocking him down. Growling a harsh, Gallic curse, he rolled over and started to rise. Something caught his eye.
He was only just beginning to realize that the projectiles launched from the cargo shuttle were not doing that much damage when they struck. The explosions were spectacular, certainly, but the shrapnel traveled so slowly it bounced off combat armor without effect. The liquid inside, for all its steaming and bubbling, didn’t seem to be doing anything except make a mess of the men’s suits… and blind the ones who got the stuff on their helmet visors. A few meters away, he saw one of the cans lying empty on the sand.
He picked it up. The top had blown off, but the rest of the can was nearly intact. Dutetre’s English was poor, but he could puzzle out the words, scraping at the thin metal with his glove to rub the ice off. Stony.
Brook. Beer.
Mon Dieu! Bière?
Angrily, Dutetre looked up suddenly at the cargo shuttle hovering above the base. Bastards! They’ve been dropping cans of beer!
Reaching down, he snatched up an FA rifle dropped on the sand, took aim at the hovering lander, and squeezed the trigger. Set on full automatic, the weapon sent a long stream of high-velocity penetrators snapping toward the target.
1716 Hours GMT
Cydonia Two aboard MSL Harper’s Bizarre
20 meters above UN Positions
South of Cydonia Prime
1431 hours MMT
Knox felt the heavy thuds of rounds striking the lobber, and twice something struck sparks from the support struts to either side of the Bizarre’s front porch. He ducked back, throwing out one arm to shove Ostrowsky back as well. Until now, only occasional rounds had come their way, either because the UN troops didn’t want the lobber to crash on top of them, or because they’d been too demoralized by the beer run to even think of shooting back.
They were shooting back now, though. Several of the troops down there were holding their ground and blazing away. They looked mad, Knox thought, as though they’d just learned the nature of the joke played on them by the Marines.
The lobber’s fuel tanks were heavily wrapped in foil insulation, and more padding—plastic sheeting, blankets, even mattresses—had been tied over the lower tankage assembly to provide some added protection from bullets, but judging from the hollow thunk of some of those impacts, and the way a thick white mist was starting to spill from behind the padding, at least a few rounds were drilling clean through.
“We got problems, people!” Elliott called. “I’m losing fuel damned fast!”
“We’re taking rounds in the storage tanks, Captain,” Knox called back. “You’d better get us clear!”
“Hell, I’m going to be lucky if we set down in one piece!”
The shuttle was faltering now, its plasma jet already giving out. “One more?” Knox asked Ostrowsky.
“Hell, yeah!” Together, they picked up one of the two remaining ice chests, opened and latched the top, and tipped it off the front porch in a glorious, spinning avalanche of brews. The lobber was falling quickly now, rotating clockwise as it fell. Elliott was apparently trying to guide them past the main hab and the other pressurized base facilities, but Bizarre had suddenly developed all of the aerodynamic proficiency of a very large rock.
“If you can, people,” Elliott told them, “try to jump clear before we hit!”
Together, Knox and Ostrowsky started unbuckling their safety harnesses. Elliott’s warning was a good one. If they jumped, they might hit soft sand and manage a roll. Stay aboard, and they could be caught between the deck as it slammed up at their feet, and the upper part of the shuttle as it slammed down from above.
He didn’t need to ask about Elliott. She was obviously still trying to coax a bit more thrust from the dying engine and wasn’t going to abandon her charge. “Ready?” he asked Ostrowsky, and he saw her answering nod. He made sure the ATAR was securely fastened to his armor, took Ostrowsky’s gloved hand, and waited a couple of seconds as they spun closer to the ground.
They were still four or five meters up when they jumped.
1716 Hours GMT
Garroway
Cydonia Prime
1431 hours MMT
Garroway was running toward the main hab when Caswell shouted, “Hey! The bastards nailed the lobber!”
He stopped, looking up and toward the right, where the squat shape of the shuttle was dropping rapidly toward some storage habs close to the main structure.
“First Section!” he yelled. “With me! The rest of you, hit that main hab!” He started running toward the falling shuttle as fast as he could manage, loose sand flying with every step. Most of the UN troops, he noted, had stopped fighting. Some were standing about with hands raised. Others were simply standing. More and more of the MMEF Marines were having to stop and take charge of prisoners.
But some were still very much in the fight, and Garroway wanted to get to the shuttle before they did.
1717 Hours GMT
Knox
Cydonia Prime
1432 hours MMT
They jumped. For a dizzying moment, Knox and Ostrowsky, still holding hands, fell with the fairy-tale slowness of falling bodies in one-third G. When they hit a moment later, they struck sand, hitting hard but rolling apart as their legs gave way beneath them. Knox ended up on his back, staring at the huge, spidery shape of Harper’s Bizarre, which seemed poised to come down on top of his head.
Then it passed him by, one landing leg colliding with a nearby ET module, which knocked the vehicle askew and sent it toppling onto its side. He half expected to see the ship burst into flame, but without oxygen it simply crumpled, its lightweight framework giving way beneath the impact. He tried to rise and his left leg shrieked pain… broken or sprained, he couldn’t tell. Dropping again, he turned to look toward the south, where a number of angry-looking blue-helmets were rapidly closing on his position.
“Oh, shit.” He grabbed his ATAR and took aim, squeezing off a short burst… and another… and another, shifting aim each time to a different target. Two of them dropped. The others wavered as he continued his one-man stand, some of them trading fire with him, until, as though by common consent, they scattered and broke for cover.
“Ostie!” he yelled over the general comm channel. “Ostie! Can you hear me?”
No answer. He saw her lying a few meters away, unmoving. “Captain Elliott! Do you copy?” No answer there, either.
A round careened off the side of his helmet, a glancing ricochet. He turned his attention to the front again, returning fire with deadly precision and grim will. Another running blue-top spun wildly, collapsed, and lay still.
1717 Hours GMT
Kaminski
Cydonia Prime
1432 hours MMT
PFC Kaminski froze in place just outside the main hab. A UN soldier had just stepped through the airlock and was hurrying toward the fighting… but he’d not seen the Marine standing rock-still just ten meters away. Let’s hear it for chameleon armor, Kaminski thought, as he pivoted his ATAR into line with the man and squeezed the trigger.
The UN soldier spun, collided with the slender flagpole in front of the hab, and collapsed. The battle was sputtering out now, with many of the surviving UN troops raising their hands. Kaminski looked up at the blue UN flag hanging from the pole and shook his head. That would never do…
“Hey, Slider!” he called. “Fulbert! Gimme a hand!”
Together, they grabbed the flagpole and hauled it up and out of the hole dug in the frozen ground to receive it. Ellen Caswell and Doc Casey trotted over to help, and in seconds, the pole came down, dragging the blue flag aflutter behind it.
Kaminski was prepared. He’d recovered the grit-scoured US flag that had flown from the Mars cat for the past three weeks and packed it in his armor’s thigh pouch. With a couple of lengths of vacuum tape supplied by Doc, he began to fasten the flag onto the pole, while Caswell yanked off the UN banner.
More gunshots sounded close by, and a round slapped into the sand by their feet, but they kept working…
1719 Hours GMT
Knox
Cydonia Prime
1434 hours MMT
Knox ducked and rolled as a stream of rounds slammed into the side of the Mars hab close by. He came to his knees, taking aim once more, when a blur of motion from his left caught the ATAR and ripped it out of his hand. He rolled to the side, looking up; an armored figure in a blue helmet loomed above him, a French rifle aimed at his head. “Do not move, American,” the man said, his accented voice sounding over the Marine frequency. Knox remembered the voice, as he remembered the name stenciled on the armor: Bergerac. A second man trotted up behind the first, and Knox heard a torrent of French.
“Pas de problèm, Lieutenant Dutetre,” Bergerac said. “We will use them as hostages for—”
A silvery something struck Bergerac in the side of his helmet, bursting in a golden spray. Knox rolled to the side, snatching at his ATAR, bringing it up just as Dutetre took aim at another figure standing in front of the crumpled wreckage of the ship. Elliott! She’d dragged herself clear of the wreckage and thrown a can of beer at Bergerac, and now Dutetre was about to shoot her down.
He squeezed the trigger, not even aiming, but simply pointing the ATAR’s muzzle and loosing a long burst into the French lieutenant’s chest, knocking him back. Bergerac spun toward him then, firing despite the smear of ice and steaming liquid clinging to his visor, the rounds stitching through the sand toward Knox’s head.
A clatter of thin, high-pitched gunshots slammed Bergerac forward, lifting him onto his toes and pitching him down and across Knox’s legs. Knox screamed as the weight smashed his injury.
“Gunny! You okay?”
It was Major Garroway, trotting toward him with his ATAR at the ready. “Shit, Major, am I glad to see you!” He turned so that he could see Elliott, limping heavily as she made her way to the scene of that last desperate fight in the sand. “You pitch a mean beer, lady,” he said admiringly. “Can’t land a spaceship worth shit…”
“Hey, any landing you can walk away from, jar-head.” He tried to sit up. “Gotta check on Ostie. She’s down.”
“M’okay,” Ostrowsky said. She sounded dazed, a bit shaken. “Had the wind knocked out of me, is all.”
“How are you, Gunny?” Garroway asked. Stooping, he rolled the French colonel’s body clear.
“Dinged m’leg in the landing. Major, we gotta do something about these Navy drivers!”
Knox looked past Garroway at the plain south of the base. The fighting, it appeared, was almost over. Gunfire continued to snap across the plain or kick up geysers of sand, but most of the UN troops were dropping their weapons now and surrendering.
“Hey, guys!” Elliott called, pointing. “Look at that!”
They all turned to see what she was pointing at. Five of the MMEF Marines had knocked down the UN flag above the base and now were raising the five-meter length of pipe once more. Kaminski’s American flag was fastened to the top, while Alexander stood nearby with an EVA camera, taking pictures.
Despite the obvious and deliberate parallelism to another Marine flag-raising, that one on a speck of volcanic rock in the Pacific nearly one hundred years before—Knox’s eyes filled with tears at the sight… an inconvenience in full armor, when you couldn’t wipe your face. Unwilling to let others hear his throat-rasping emotion, he dropped his voice to a growl. “So, is that it?” he said. “Did we win?”
“We won,” Garroway said. Without ceremony, he raised his right arm, touching his glove to his helmet in salute, dropping his hand as the flagpole reached the vertical and was anchored in place at the base.
“Ooh-rah,” Knox said. “What’d we win?”
“That, I’m afraid, has yet to be determined.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Elliott said. Knox could hear the grin in her voice. “These two missed a case when they were chucking the beer overboard. At least we have that!”
Garroway laughed. “It’ll do for now, people. It’ll do for now.”
Behind him, the American flag flew from its makeshift pole in the golden light of the Martian afternoon.
