The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds (36 page)

Kastl’s report gets grimmer after that. We’ve lost
all of our main batteries, and only have one long gun salvageable
for manual aiming. We’re down to only six missiles, and less than
two thousand rounds of 20mm. Ammo for our AP guns isn’t much
better, and only half of those turrets are still online. He
estimates we could hold off a few ground assaults, but wouldn’t be
able to repel even one Disc before running dry.

Thomasen considers that digging in and waiting for
resupply would probably fail. The strategy might resist Disc
attack, but if they’re supported by ground troops to dig down to
us, or have any kind of big gun or bunker-buster, we would be
breached.

Rios concurs: We can’t hold off another combined
attack. Discs or other air support would chew up our troopers (our
only resource that’s still relatively well supplied) if they tried
to defend against a ground attack, and his best positions would be
hard-pressed to hold against getting hit simultaneously from air
and ground.

Rick considers mining the perimeter, setting traps,
but that would only hold off one wave, and not even that if the
enemy could be dropped inside our perimeter from the air.

What’s uncomfortably clear (and I’m hoping that
Earthside understands this) is that the disparity of force has
shifted after only one battle: We are no longer the most powerful
or technologically superior army on this planet.

“Then we have to fight like it,” Rios is the first to
say.

I nod my agreement.

“We can’t maintain a defensive posture,” I decide.
“If Chang can, he’ll hit us again before we get re-supplied in
January. Or he’ll hit us to take the drops from us for
himself.”

“We could try asking for an ETE presence,” Tru
considers, then shoots down her own idea: “But they would have to
basically garrison us, and Earthside would never accept giving
control of this real estate to someone they’re just as afraid of as
Chang.”

“We could move the civvies and supports out of the
base,” Anton tries. “See if the ETE will take them in until we can
get relief.”

“You think anybody would go?” Tru challenges.

“Earthside wouldn’t like the ETE in charge of our
people any more than they would tolerate them in charge of our
bases,” Lisa goes further.

“I won’t take the option off the table,” I surprise
my team. “But I won’t go there unless I feel we can’t hold here any
longer.”

“This is home,” Tru insists, darkening, looking now
very much like the hardened Eco warrior (a side of her I’ve seen
more and more since the battle). “We’ve invested too much to just
run away. We need to hit these bastards back, make them think twice
about coming this way again.”

“Chang will likely need time to rebuild,” I give her.
“It sounded like he put the majority of his resources into his
little show of force. But we also know he’s got some way to
manufacture quickly and in quantity.”

“Assuming he doesn’t run out of manpower, since he
treats them like cannon fodder,” Tru stays dark.

“He’s got drone tech,” Rios thinks ahead. “No reason
he couldn’t decide he doesn’t need his so-called allies.”

“I don’t know if he needs them now, except for labor
and a show that he’s all about saving the planet for the locals,”
Rick calculates. “If he can manufacture without them, or force them
into slave labor… He already blew the illusion that he gives a shit
about whether they live or die.”

I nod, still hoping I can use that to lever his pawns
away from him. I expect he’ll blame the slaughter all on us, on me,
claiming that he underestimated our (my) bloodlust. My hope is that
his soldiers figure out he stood them all in our gun sights without
providing them any more protection than some clean new
light-armored uniforms, barely sufficient stop a small-caliber
PDW.

“Analyses of his aircraft show relatively simple
designs, all mass-produced,” Morales shifts to the technical. “The
only real surprise was the lift system of his new ship. It was lost
beyond reverse-engineering, but those fans and jets were backed up
by some kind of magnetic repulsion system—its output was part of
what jammed us.”

“That’s why it was so hard to bring down,” Rick gives
his own analysis. “We kept trying to hit secondary systems, break
the spine of the thing.”

“The Knights somehow knew where to hit it,” Kastl
remembers.

“Scan, guess or intel?” Lisa wants to know.

“I’ll be sure to ask,” I take on.

“What we know about the Discs… or think we know about
the Discs… estimates a few months to ‘grow’ a new batch,” Anton
calculates. “How long until Chang—assuming he put
himself
back together—finishes more of those big ships?”

“Or something even worse,” Metzger worries. “All he
really needs to do is make one ship tougher than the last one.”

“Even if Paul put Chang out of the game for awhile,
he probably gave his cronies what they need to make their own
toys,” Tru considers. “You know they’ll run with it even in his
absence, try to take us and everyone else.”

“We need to hit his factories,” Lisa concludes for
me.

“First we need to find them, Colonel,” Rick points
out the obvious. “And it’s not like we’re in a good state for doing
that kind of recon.”

“Then we need help,” I decide.

John Wayne Sutter is both forthcoming and good at
drawing maps by hand. Given a stylus and a graphic table, he gives
us a pretty detailed representation of the Northeast Melas Rim.
Zodanga—or at least where the Knights have seen Air Pirate
activity—sits high up on the shear upper rim, about center of a
gentle thirty mile long concave curve. The position gives the
Zodangans excellent command of a wide range of territory that
includes the ruins of Avalon, Mariner and Melas One, bordered on
the west side by The City of Industry.

Melas Two, however, is out of their direct
sightlines, around a point on the eastern edge of their cliffs,
though they probably have set up some kind of observation post to
keep an eye on us.

“Our Noble Ancestors attempted a number sorties into
the Zodangan Holds for justice,” Sutter makes it worse. “That was
many years ago, and I expect the pirates now have greater offensive
and defensive resources. Back then, the cliff wall was
well-defended by hidden cannon and cave-bays from which they could
launch their light flyers. Also, their big frigate would patrol the
rim when not out raiding. It was easy for them to pin us down and
drive us back without exposing themselves significantly. It’s one
of the reasons we’ve had to keep our own Holds so well-hidden.”

“But it does give you an idea of where they are,” I
point out. He marks positions on his map, including drawing a deep
cut perpendicular into the cliff-face about a third of the length
from the eastern point.

“This channel is a narrow steep-walled canyon, about
five miles long into Ophir Planum. It’s on the old pre-bombardment
maps, and seems to have survived the Apocalypse mostly intact. It
would be an ideal manufacturing and docking port for their big
ships, out of sight from the main valley and easy to defend at its
mouth.”

“You could hide a small fleet of those sailing
zeppelins in there,” Metzger calculates, bringing the canyon up on
the post-Bang satellite maps we got from the Lancer.

“And the mining operations to pull the raw
materials,” Morales agrees.

“The advantage of their position could be turned
against them,” Sutter offers, pointing to the narrow channel where
the long thin gorge joints the Melas rim. “The narrowness of the
canyon mouth is a choke-point going
both
ways. If you could
hold them inside, hold that part of the Rim, they couldn’t get out.
Their airships won’t fly in above-Planum atmospheric pressure.
Unfortunately, that entire stretch of rim is Zodanga-controlled.
You’d have to drive them from their cliff caves first.”

“That would take an orbital bombardment,” I tell him
what he’s probably already considered, “a message I hope we never
have to send.”

“Or a long, ugly ground fight,” Lisa remembers
similar scenarios played out on Earth.

“They’re blind here,” Rios indicates the eastern
point, on our side of which another box canyon—much wider—cuts into
the rim. “Unless they do have lookouts.”

“Which we could take out,” I go blood-thirsty.

“Then what?” Kastl discounts. “you’ve still got ten
miles in the open, and through whatever rim defenses they have,
then down a five mile ideal ambush corridor, into an unknown
base.”

“I’m liking the orbital bombardment option,” Metzger
concurs.

I draw a straight line from the box canyon cut on our
side of the point, up and over the Planum to the Zodangan
canyon.

“That’s less than ten miles,” Anton sees where I’m
going.

“You planning to do it on foot?” Rick criticizes.
“That’s a four mile climb
before
your ten mile hike across
an open plain in near-vacuum.”

“We’d need aircraft,” I insist. Morales looks like
she’s in pain. I let her off the hook. “Back to the part where we
need help.”

1 November, 2116:

It’s as bad as the ETE showed me on video.

Shinkyo Colony—or at least that part of the colony
left in the open after the ETE took it and unburied it—is a smoking
ruin of craters, pounded by merciless artillery or bombs. It looks
like every exposed section has been holed, shattered, burned.

The only sign of resistance are the wrecks of at
least half-a-dozen of their light fighters, scattered across the
plain, shot apart, crashed. And bits of a somewhat greater number
of those “kite” fighters that Chang apparently made for his pirate
friends.

I regret that I have to use an ETE airship to get
myself here in person, but I have nothing left to spare (or, more
accurately,
risk
for a trip as long and potentially
treacherous as this). I expect the Shinkyo will blame the ETE for
the attack as much as Chang. So I have Paul’s team drop me off,
with Sakina, Thomas and Sutter (brought along as a representative
of the New Knights, but “disguised” in a fresh UNMAC LA uniform
with lieutenant’s bars), and fly back out of sight in the dust.

Hatsumi Sakura doesn’t keep me waiting long this
time. She appears out of the dust with a retainer of six shinobi
like she’d been waiting for me.

There’s no kneeling this time. No tea. Only
respectful bows, standing facing each other across the sand in view
of their damaged colony.

“I’m sorry,” I have to tell her, despite what
weakness it might imply.

“You have nothing to apologize for, Colonel,” she
tells me through her ever-present mask, her eyes still covered by
opaque lenses, rendering her expressionless. “I have heard that you
and your warriors fought well, and cost our mutual enemies
dearly.”

“Not dearly enough,” I counter with an edge in my
voice I hope she appreciates. “They still had ships and drones
enough to do this to you.”

“
One
ship,” she clarifies with even disdain.
“One of those ridiculous inflatable pirate ships. Enough to deliver
their ‘message’ and then run away like cowards when we did not
simply surrender. Their master—the Shadow—did not even have the
character to come to the fight himself.
Janeway
spoke for
him. We would have burned him out of the sky, but he ran away as
soon as we got our fighters airborne, and let his master’s Discs do
his killing for him. Only after we finished them did he send his
flyers, and those only to cover his retreat.”

This matches what the ETE describe they responded to
too late: Barely seventy-two hours after our battle, Orange and
Gold stations detected explosions at Shinkyo. Wary of another
shinobi ploy, they approached cautiously, only to arrive to the
devastation I’m now seeing, a few surviving Shinkyo fighters
limping after a retreating Zodangan frigate. The Guardians chose to
help the wounded rather than pursue the attackers, probably further
endearing them to the Shinkyo. The frigate disappeared into a dust
blow, and the pursuing fighters did not return.

“We did monitor the records you sent into space,” she
focuses. “Your meeting with the Shadow, and your impressive routing
of his forces. This Chang-thing promised he would wipe
nanotechnology off this planet—except his own, of course. Our own
ultimatum was certainly expected, though he chose to insult us by
sending a lackey and a cowardly drone attack.”

She doesn’t mention her own losses. I wonder if
Janeway believed he was attacking the power-base of the Shinkyo and
not just bombarding their vulnerable civilian population. Or maybe
he knew exactly what he was doing, sending Chang’s message. Or
maybe he was sending his own, given the possibility that Chang is
either dead or slowly regenerating himself. Janeway may well have
declared himself commander in Chang’s absence. I wonder again what
became of Captain Bly.

I reach into my jacket and hand her a flashcard. One
of her shinobi steps up and takes it from me, examining it before
he gives it to her. She brings up images of the ships that attacked
us, focusing on our analyses of Chang’s main ship.

“The fans and jets are actually secondary,” I
explain. “There’s some kind of magnetic resistance that keeps the
thing up off the iron-rich surface. It also helps jam our
communications, might even fry anything electronic that got
underneath it. Thankfully our long-lost brethren managed to detect
the output from where they were and figure out where to hit it,” I
give her what Sutter told me (and I find I do believe him, despite
the pervasive lack of trust on this planet).

“We did not face anything like this,” she admits
thoughtfully. “Only one sail-airship, four Discs, and twelve of
what you are calling ‘Kites’.”