The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (40 page)

Nine remaining H-A suits—Rios started with twelve
this time—crunch boots on the gravel, crawl forward behind their
weapons, carefully fanning out. Rios signals them into a paired
staggered skirmish line, warns them again not to rush forward, to
stay clear of the deeper ravines until they can be systematically
swept. MAI suggests grenades to secure some of the more obvious
blind spots, but Rios isn’t willing to waste ordnance blasting at
nothing, especially if it will only kick up more dust. I watch
through his optics as he surveys his suits as they get low, trying
not to make easy targets of themselves, and take the terrain
yard-by-yard, rock-by-rock, ditch-by-ditch. Then I watch his gaze
turn forward just in time to catch a dark blur come flying right at
his face. Even without the bulk of his armor, I doubt he could duck
it—the “torpedo” hits him square in the face plate with enough
force to send him reeling. I’m surprised it doesn’t crack. His
video feed jars as he goes down on his butt.

“Stay down, Lieutenant,” I tell him. “You’re dead.”
MAI agrees and silences his feed to his remaining teammates. I
expect he’s spitting some choice words into his helmet.

“Hold!” Sergeant Hendricks tries to take over as the
other suits spray stunner simmunitions and lob stun grenades at the
most likely origin point of the thrown torpedo, raging to “avenge”
their Lieutenant. They do damage to a lot of rock and sand. Waste
ammo. “Line discipline!”

One of the video feeds—this one from Specialist
Embry, who was on left flank—suddenly jerks straight down and I see
the blur of the cloak before something slams her in the faceplate.
MAI declares her another “casualty.” But this time the cloaked blur
doesn’t simply drop out of sight, fading into the haze and terrain.
It leaps high over their line like a bird of prey and lands in the
midst of them, and then it whirls. Torpedoes slam two more suits
down, almost simultaneously. Then she’s got a hold of two more. She
tosses the heavy H-A suits around like they’re empty plastic,
throwing one into another, turning their weapons on each other,
using them as shields. I hear bodies in armor grunt and gasp for
lost wind and curse in protest as MAI declares kill after kill.

Hendricks is the last to go. She’s sitting on his
chest with one of her “knives” wedged into the gap between his
helmet and neck armor. I get a good look into her eyes through her
goggled demon-mask. She looks like she’s smiling. She also looks
like she’s barely breathing hard. Hendricks offers her his open
hands in surrender, but she takes her time letting him up.

“Game over,” Matthew admits wearily. “Signal end of
exercise.”

Sergeant Horst, playing field observer, calls it.

“How many does that make?” I ask Matthew idly. He
knows I’ve been keeping count.

“Four different simulations, same outcome,” Horst
confirms as we sit around the conference table barely an hour
later, the holo-screen replaying MAI’s reconstructions. “She gets
inside the perimeter unseen, breaches the base without making so
much as a hiccup on our security sensors, does damage to a variety
of critical targets, steals essential gear, neutralizes whatever
resistance that can respond, gets out before we know she’s out,
then neutralizes her ground pursuit. All without the benefit of a
firearm. All without taking one confirmed hit.”

“Scary bitch,” Matthew mutters sideways. Then to me
specifically: “You still sure it’s wise to let her shack up with
you?”

MAI’s feed shows her back in my quarters—now that the
internal security feeds have been restored since her initial entry
this morning—sitting cross-legged on my bed, perfectly still. Her
mask is off, but her cloaks and body armor are still on. And she’s
got her real weapons back, not the blunted “practice” pieces
Morales quickly machined for our little war games.

“I checked with Abbas,” I try to reassure him. “He
confirms it’s tradition for a tribal lord’s chief bodyguard to
sleep near his bed.”

“None of your officers are even remotely comfortable
with this,” he reminds me, “even if you two have got this creepy
bond or whatever going,” he rewords what I’d tried to explain to
him to convince him not to try to arrest her or evict her by force,
even though she not only broke into the base undetected, but found
her way into my bedroom. “I see it now,” he half-sarcastically
agrees, watching her on the feed. “She reminds me of you, when you
were that age.”

On the feed, her face turns up and looks into the
camera. She smiles her half-smile.

“She could
not
have heard me,” Matthew
protests in a whisper. “Definitely reminds me of you.”

I catch Lisa’s eyes locked on me from across the
table. She’s worried—probably terrified—but she won’t tell me so,
not even as my Operations Commander. And there’s something else…
Jealousy? She seems to catch the question in my eyes and looks
away.

(Bad thoughts: Sakina does resemble Lisa. And both
got my attention by getting the drop on me. I shake off the
implications.)

“We just gave her the parameters and let her go,”
Anton tries to process, his awe almost overshadowing how unsettled
he sounds. “She ran her attack four times four different ways with
barely ten minutes between entries to prep. How does
anybody
do that?”

“I can’t wrap my head around this either,” Rick
protests. “You’re sure she’s not nano-enhanced?”

“She willingly gave us blood and a tissue sample,”
Halley confirms, calling up the results. “She even seemed offended
at the suggestion.”

I nod. “I think she needs to prove she can be better
than a nano-hybrid with what nature gave her.”

“Granola Girl of Death,” Matthew jokes darkly. “Might
want to keep her away from the Blues Brothers.” But then he goes
quiet quick when he sees the look in my eyes—we haven’t heard a
word from the ETE about Paul or Simon since the Shinkyo tore them
up with that nuke. That was six days ago.

“I’d guess her to be between twenty-five and thirty,”
Halley summarizes her initial exam. “Excellent health, considering
the environment. No UV damage, no sign of radiation sickness. Good
hydration. Development shows exceptional nutrition—if she lived on
the surface, she kept fed, most likely with access to supplements.
Passive scans show somewhat unusual bone and muscle development,
but not low-G wasting. If anything, she’s built like a young
Olympic gymnast. It may reflect what the Nomads told us about their
weight-bearing discipline—she’s wearing what would easily be more
than her body weight in armor, and she moves in it like it’s
nothing. She told Colonel Ram she’s been ‘training’ obsessively
since she was a small child. We’d speculated over the years as to
what the human body could achieve biomechanically given this
low-gravity environment. Even after two generations on-planet, she
still has the genetics to build muscle and bone enough to handle
Earth gravity, and it appears she’s gone to extreme lengths to
maximize what she’s got naturally. It’s like the best of both
worlds. I’d guess she’s probably at least twice as strong as any of
us, pound-for-pound, with the speed and coordination to match.”

“And she knows how to use it,” Rios assesses, still
visibly smarting from getting his armored ass kicked four times in
a row.

“Imagine what she could do if she took off all that
metal,” Anton considers, watching her on his screen, then catches
himself with a blush: “That probably didn’t sound right.”

“She can throw her big knives hard and fast enough to
crack our armor,” Rick repeats what we’ve seen. “And she’s accurate
enough to hit between the plates even at twenty meters. And those
big metal spikes of hers—her ‘torpedoes’—weigh enough to break your
neck or cave your chest in even if they didn’t just punch right
through you like a bullet. And then there’s her garrote…” He calls
up a diagram of two short blades that connect pommel-to-pommel, but
spin apart, with a thin wire spooled inside to connect them. “…the
monofilament line is nano-manufacture, possibly a Shinkyo device.
She gets this around you, it could take your head or arm or leg off
in one jerk.”

“Her breaking gear
is
SOF issue,” Matthew
confirms. “Inventoried to a unit stationed at Freedom Colony.”

“She said the men she took it from looked like Nomads
but wore our uniforms,” I repeat.

“PK?” Horst wonders.

“Too far from any confirmed ‘Keep’,” I discount.

“Either descendants of our people or raiders who
scored our gear,” Matthew reasons.

“It’d be nice to believe the former,” Halley
hopes.

“Your girl have any other intel on the subject?”
Matthew asks, then realizes he probably just added to the general
discomfort by calling her “my girl”.

“Farouk displaced other indigenous groups when he
moved into the area,” I relay Abbas’ version. “No sense that any of
those tribes were ex-UNMAC.”

“Could have been assimilated,” Lisa offers.

“An explanation for CROATOAN?” Matthew reaches.

“Her base plans were from classified construction
blueprints,” Anton changes topics when speculation dries up,
calling up the files downloaded from her flashcard. “If she says
she got them from Shinkyo, it would explain how our ninja visitors
knew their way around so well.”

“
Is
she Shinkyo?” Lisa confronts. “Some new
ruse to get in?”

“If she was Shinkyo, I’d think she’d have taken us
apart by now,” I defend, despite how practical my team is being.
“Or they would have before this, because they’d have more like
her.”

“You said yourself, the bastards always have multiple
motives for anything they do,” Matthew reminds me.

“She’s definitely better at what she does that they
were,” Rios readily agrees, “despite how scary that thought is. But
if the Shinkyo ninja can do a
fraction
of what she can, we
need to rethink our defenses.”

“You think she’s really here to help us?” Lisa asks
me directly. I glance across the table at Tru, who hasn’t said a
word. She won’t meet my eyes now. I finally answer with a
shrug.

“Is she here on Farouk’s orders?” Lisa tries another
likely tack.

“Farouk strikes me as greedy and impatient, if not
dangerously foolhardy. He would have sent her to break us open,
leave us for the taking. Again: She could have done that
already.”

“And she wouldn’t just show us how she could,” Rios
tries.

“Unless she’s trying to intimidate,” Matthew
counters, “show us she lives up to her mythical reputation.”

“Or playing with us is part of the plan,” Lisa
follows. “In which case, we need to figure out the plan.”

On the security feed, I watch her sit in my room,
perfectly still, her body settled, her face peaceful. Like she’s at
home.

“She’s a valuable asset,” I assess flatly. “She’s
worth some risk. But that doesn’t mean we let our guard down.”

21 September, 2115:

It doesn’t take Farouk long to either make good on
his veiled threats or react to the loss of his “demon” (assuming he
even knows she’s with us).

The remote batteries to the southeast catch a squad
of Nomads sneaking up with improvised charges. Too bad for them
we’d long-since tuned the sensors to sweep for the kind of stealth
we’d expect from the Shinkyo—the Nomad cloaks make them invisible
to infrared, and they use the terrain well to mask their movement,
but they don’t move with absolute silence, and they couldn’t reach
all of the batteries to neutralize them without being seen. It’s
possible they just didn’t expect how swiftly our defenses would
respond. Three Nomads are dead (one blown up by his own device) and
the rest are running before we can even start warming up an
ASV.

By the time we get airborne, we see that the group
that made a run at our outer defenses was probably meant to make an
opening for a much larger force. Perhaps a hundred cloaks are now
fleeing south, apparently discouraged by the swift defeat of their
advance party, and not willing to risk a repeat of their
experiences with the PK (especially without Farouk’s Zauba’a to
help them). I look for the telltale shape of a helmet-less H-A suit
running with the other cloaks, but it doesn’t look like Farouk
dared come to the fight in person.

Zauba’a (I’ve kept my word and not called her Sakina
in front of anyone) walks with me to survey the scene. ASVs still
circle above us, but there’s been no further sign of surface
movement for an hour. She pulls the masks from the dead Nomads and
casually confirms that they were indeed members of Farouk’s
band.

I watch Rios watching her all the while. He’s a good
soldier, and he keeps his discomfort with her presence as much to
himself as anyone can, but I can still see his suspicions rise when
he sees how easily she takes the deaths of former comrades. I walk
away from Zauba’a, ostensibly to check on the condition of the
batteries, and quietly chime Rios on my Link.

“What’s on your mind, Lieutenant?”

I see him turn away so that she won’t see him talking
to me inside his helmet.

“Is she really that cold, sir, or did she expect
this?”

“Didn’t
you
expect this?” I return evenly.

“Expect it as in
planned
it, sir,” he
clarifies.

“It’s possible, Lieutenant,” I allow him. I turn back
and look after Zauba’a, but she’s not there.

She’s not anywhere.

Abbas calls me on his Link by noon. Farouk is already
spreading word through the tribes that we attacked a “peace
delegation” that we’d invited to meet with us, “murdering” dozens
of his people. I send him the video feed of Farouk’s men trying to
take out our perimeter defenses and then running in panic, and
encourage him to share it freely. He assures me that he will.