The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds (15 page)

Thomas has moved her troopers up to the shattered
opening, but then the rock and sand explodes right in their faces,
knocking them back down the corridor. The Dutchman has shifted
targets.

“Done waiting,” I growl. “Main batteries. Bring them
down.”

The bigger perimeter turrets spin and start spraying
20mm explosive rounds as fast as they can cycle. I watch the
Dutchman’s drive fans pivot and try to move her off. There’s at
least one visible larger explosion on her gun deck—likely we hit
one of their “powder” stores—then flashes from her cannons as she
tries shooting back. The perimeter wall takes hits, but she misses
the batteries themselves. Then one of her fans breaks free and
drops, followed by her aft-most under-mast, which is left hanging
by rigging. The big airship lists, but manages to correct. The
dragging mast is quickly cut loose.

“She’s running,” Kastl confirms.

“Too easy,” Matthew criticizes.

“If they had our blueprints, they know what to expect
from our guns,” I agree.

I flip to Rios’ channel. His troopers are shooting it
out in the greenery, at least a dozen pirates trying to take the
greenhouse facility.

“Colonel Ram, it’s Tru,” I hear a new voice over the
Link. “As civilian rep and an interested party, I’d like to remind
you that quite a few of my people are competent bearing arms.”

“Appreciated,” I tell her. “Armory Four has a stock
of PDWs. Specialist Wei will check you out what you need. I’ll
flash you a projection of potential defensive positions—your people
can be a second line if they make it in past our armor.”

“Not what I was hoping for, but I’ll take it,” she
returns, her voice edged with rage. I’m sure she’d rather be making
a stand protecting her garden.

“Colonel,” Kastl interrupts. “Main Battery One…”

Blips are swarming the dual gun turrets. Close
visuals show the flare and spark of cutting tools. MAI’s alarms
show that they’ve jammed the barrel clusters; another shot would
burst them. Then Main Battery Two gets similar attention.

“They wanted us to spin up our guns so they could see
what we’ve got,” Matthew figures. “Now they know the best stuff to
jack.”

“Smart,” I agree grimly. “They keep us from
perforating their ship, and we can’t fire on our own batteries
without wrecking them.”

“So either we let them steal our biggest guns or
destroy them ourselves,” Matthew angrily sums.

“Didn’t think they came for just groceries and
bandages,” I hear Rios chime in. The greenhouse pirates have
settled into defensive positions, keeping the H-A troopers busy
without too much exposure. They also know we’re not willing to use
anything heavy against them in the garden, which is our least
defensible facility.

I get back on with Council Blue.

“The decoy ship opened fire on us as soon as we tried
to get airborne,” he feeds me before I can ask. “They’ve used this
tactic on us before: Attack and back off, knowing we won’t pursue
to destroy them after they’ve stopped attacking. And they’re
keeping outside of our field-effect range. We can get past them,
but they’ll delay us. We won’t be there for another twenty minutes
or more.”

“Colonel Ava to Colonel Ram,” I get the call from
Melas Three. “I can have air support to you in twenty minutes.”

“Appreciate it,” I tell her, “but I expect they know
to be gone by then.”

“I’m spinning up a flight anyway,” she countermands
me.

“I’m betting they’d swarm in if we opened our bays to
launch,” Matthew is considering. “Probably waiting for that very
thing: take a ship or two while they’re here stealing our big
guns.”

“Use it against them!” Tru cuts in. “They want a big
prize, open a door. I can have a hundred guns in there
waiting.”

I consider it for a few seconds, then give her the
go. If the pirates did their homework, they’ve estimated our troop
strength, but probably didn’t think about all the ex-Ecos living
with us.

“Give us sixty seconds,” she calculates.

“We’ve got a busted bird in Bay Four,” Metzger
considers. “If we light up some spare solid rocket fuel, it might
look like an honest liftoff. The smoke will add cover for the
ambush.”

“Do it,” I tell them.

Meanwhile, Thomas manages to get her armor back
outside now that the Dutchman has moved off. She had two suits go
down in the bombardment—they’re being dragged to Medical—and the
rest of her troopers are eager to hit back at something. The red
suits dig in and start carefully picking pirates off of Main
Battery One. The invaders quickly shift and try to use the turrets
for cover. Kastl makes it harder for them by keeping the disabled
turrets turning at random.

I’d lost sight of Sakina. But then pirates start
falling off of Main Battery Two.

“Sergeant Horst!” Thomas shouts out. “Take a squad
and give our girl some back up!”

“Just don’t shoot the red cape by mistake,” Rios
adds. “That pisses her off.”

“Our little special effect is ready, Colonel,”
Metzger lets me know.

“Trap’s got teeth,” Tru follows a few moments
later.

“Spring it.”

The Dutchman is trying to come back around. Its
cannons flare, but they concentrate on Main Battery Three, what it
apparently considers its last biggest threat. A fresh wave of
gliders flits through the airspace overhead.

Feedback says they’ve managed to unplug Main Battery
Two’s main turret guns from MAI’s control, but Kastl takes a risk
and opens Main Battery One’s missile hatch and pops a pair of SAMs
toward the incoming airship. The back blast drives a few of the
raiders into Thomas’ gunsights, and Kastl slams the missile hatch
down on one pirate’s greedy fingers, crushing them. The SAMs burst
angrily on the Dutchman’s gun deck, and I can see bodies thrown
from the ship. The remaining pirates atop the battery shift from
trying to steal the guns to trying to disable the missile launcher
by welding the hatch shut. This only gives Thomas better
targets.

Across the complex, Aircraft Bay Four is open and
venting exhaust. The pirate gliders focus their swarm, and within
an impressively short amount of time have dropped some kind of huge
net over the decoy ASV. Metzger elevates the pad part-way,
effectively simulating the beginning of a lift off. The pirates
take their opportunity and “board” the ship, leaping from their
gliders and using their net for a foothold.

Tru’s good. She gives the pirates all the time they
need to feel confident they’ve got the ship—I can see at least a
dozen bodies clinging to it. The pirates follow-up with a bonus
attempt, rappelling another dozen raiders directly down into the
bay in hopes of scoring another ship or two. Tru lets them just
touch down in the exhaust smoke before all of her ex-Ecos
demonstrate why UNMAC needed to send garrisons of heavily armored
troops and air support to deal with them fifty-plus years ago. The
bay becomes a sudden storm of gunfire. The invaders barely get off
a shot.

She’s done in less than thirty seconds (though a few
shots bark in the aftermath just to make sure there’s no one left
with any fight in them). The Eco crossfire was so impressive that
the pirates don’t dare that way again.

“So very glad you’re on our side now, Ms. Greenlove,”
I give her. Matthew grins and shakes his head.

“We do seem to be stuck with each other, Colonel,”
she returns with her usual flirtatiousness.

As the pirates try to regroup, Thomas gets a better
foothold on the surface, systematically clearing the hatch-breaking
crews off our main bunkers, effectively driving a wedge between
those that still cling to the west batteries and those that are
pinned down and locked out of our landing bays. This gives Sergeant
Horst room to advance across the compound toward Main Battery Two,
but he still gets met with a discouraging amount of gunfire.

With more breathing room around our bigger entries,
Sergeant Thomasen gets one of our old mobile gun platforms rolling
out of the vehicle bay. It’s been sitting for fifty years, so it’s
a little glitchy, but it gets up and gets crawling. Horst has his
men fall in behind it to use it as a rolling shield, while Thomasen
sights its guns on the now rapidly approaching Dutchman. He starts
spinning 20mm penetrating rounds through the main gas-filled hull,
but the ship appears designed to take the abuse. He shifts to start
chewing at the sail masts and forward drive fans with the load he
has left. This gets the pirates on the pads moving to try to hit
him from behind, but that brings them into Thomas’ waiting guns.
The best the pirates can do is cling to the concrete and steel
decking to avoid ICW fire, which is when Thomas switches to
grenades.

I can watch this happen directly now, the Command
Tower ports giving an excellent view over the landing bays. If
Thomasen had managed to restore all of our light bunker-mounted
batteries, we’d be able to sweep the rest of the pirates from our
roof easily, but most of those guns had been lost in the slide. I
make a mental note to put replacing at least a few more key guns on
his priority list. For now, all I can do is watch Thomas work.

Thomasen’s to-do list gets longer when Main Battery
Three goes offline, damaged by the cannon fire. Whatever Sakina has
managed seems to have cleared Main Battery Two enough that Horst’s
team can foothold there. Through his Link feed, I see how the
pirates have jammed the turret guns with their tools and even with
parts of their comrades’ bodies. Horst’s troopers set to work
clearing the barrel clusters.

The Dutchman sweeps over us, undaunted by the smaller
rounds we can still throw at it. It sends a broadside to punch more
holes in our beleaguered greenhouse, sending Rios’ troopers for
cover as the pirates there run from their cover for open desert
(where some of them are unfortunate enough to wander into the
Nomads’ guns). Thomas has to do a similar duck-and-cover when her
positions get peppered with grenades dropped as the big ship passes
over, giving the pirates on the bunker roof and on Main Battery One
time to pull out. Our troopers fire up at the airship’s underbelly,
but it’s well hardened against small arms fire (an expected feature
given the pirates’ experience against ground forces).

The Dutchman drops dozens of lines, making the
airship resemble a jellyfish. The lines skim the ground and the
bunker rooftops, and the remaining pirates dash for them, grabbing
on to be hauled efficiently upward. Our guns pick a few of them off
as they rise, but the extraction is overall very effective. The
Dutchman calculates a lazy turn, still tossing the occasional
covering grenade, and points its bow westward to recover those that
retreated from the greenhouse attack.

It’s close enough to get spotlights on, so we can get
a bright, clear visual. The gas hull is holed in dozens of places,
but seems to have some kind of self-patching feature. One of its
four main fans is gone and one no longer spins, but the other two
seem to provide adequate compensation. There is severe damage to
the gun deck, but it still bristles with what appear to be
functional cannon. And zooming in, I can see a familiar blonde mane
standing at the bow railing: It’s Captain Thompson Bly, glaring
down at the Command Tower—at
me
—with a defiant grin.

“Medical, I need Corpsmen and trauma pods,” I hear
Horst call.

“Casualties?” I ask.

“I’ve got four in bad shape, six that can walk,”
Horst tells me the cost of his compound crossing. “But I’ve also
got your girl down…”

His helmet feed shows me the familiar red cloak.
Sakina’s crouched down on the rocks that pad the outer perimeter
wall, wedged for cover between the reinforcing ribs of the
centrifuge that forms the corner “tower” of the defensive wall.
She’s coiled almost fetal, one of her stout knives tight in each
fist. Even over the feed, I can see pain under the rage in her
eyes, and her mask is dripping fresh bright blood, leaking. She
tries to get up when Horst gets close, but can’t.

“She’s taken a bad one, Colonel.”

I’m already in Medical when they all start coming
in.

Five of my troopers are DOA. Seven needed to be
brought down in trauma pods just to keep them stable for the short
trip. Twelve have stable gunshot wounds, and two more have crush
injuries from the Dutchman’s cannons.

Tru carried two of her own people down personally.
Both should pull through, but will have long recoveries. Her minor
wounded are tending themselves to take the pressure off the limited
Medical facility and staff, and she offers volunteers for
everything from first aid to surgical assist. Our Nomad residents
report no casualties (but don’t sound terribly proud of that).

Rios and Thomas coordinated a sweep to check the
enemy dead and gather up their wounded as prisoners. I don’t tell
either of them to give the Zodangans any priority for Medical, and
they don’t ask me. Their initial counts are thirty-six dead pirates
and another dozen with bullet and shrapnel wounds. Thomasen’s crew
welds the blown Airlock Two shut, and the blast-ravaged chamber
becomes a makeshift brig for our prisoners while they await
triage.

Sakina was stubborn. She made Horst take his own
wounded in first. I had to use his Link to order her to let them
put her in a pod. She dropped into shock as soon as she was hooked
up.

Her armor is weak at the waist to give her
flexibility. She took a round below her breast plate that pierced
colon and kidney, narrowly missing her spine and her big iliac
blood vessels. The round fragmented and started bleeds in her liver
as well. I’m absolutely numb as I watch the medical scanners image
the damage. The trauma pod’s surgical arms automatically begin
digging into her to extract any remaining fragments and stop the
major bleeds, anesthetizing as they go, refilling her with
synthetic plasma. Her vitals are coming back by the time Horst
himself gets the pod to Ryder, but she’s got five other wounded
triaged ahead.