Warzone: Nemesis: A Novel of Mars (35 page)

The combined force of all the mag charges killed six of the eight pilots as they were trying to eject. As if right on cue, all the tanks started tracking the last two pilots. I was the first one to find LTC Matulevich. He had broken a leg when his retrorocket boots malfunctioned. I drew my colts and made my way to him before my wingman or any of my pilots arrived. He had his service revolver pointed at me, but dropped it when I put a bullet through his right wrist. My enemy’s eyes were as cold and hard as onyx stones, and he offered me one last defiant one-fingered salute. I stood over him for a few seconds, and then shot him through the helmet in the forehead. His helmet had a star in it as if in need of glass repair—his head bearing a neat hole dripping blood.
One down, one to go
… I accessed my radio link in my suit. “I want that other pilot alive!”

The one surviving Soviet pilot was 1LT Daniil Ryzhkov. I had a couple of men restrain him while we pulled the tooth with the embedded tracking device. I called the scavenger crew to reclaim the precious alloy-x and called up the satellite.

Our satellite showed a well-defended Soviet post with nine guntowers and ten turrets, well-placed for maximum defense. The Soviet factory was spitting out tanks and bombers as fast as possible. An attack didn’t look advisable at this time. We’d lose too many ships and men and all the scrap would be recovered by the Soviets. I assigned an escort to deliver the prisoner back to our post for questioning. The loss of LTC Matulevich was going to hurt COL Kiknadze. We sat and waited while the scavengers picked the area clean, then returned to our post.

I had my chief interrogator, CPT Black Ice, work on our prisoner. To his credit, the young officer didn’t seem to be giving up anything, so I gave the captain the approval to turn up the interview a notch. We didn’t officially exist as far as the Geneva Convention was concerned. After yesterday, we assumed there was no agreement about the handling of prisoners. We’d also had an agreement about using redfield generators. Since both sides had now used them, I assumed that no previous agreement would be honored. Since there were no Rules of Engagement, we’d torture our guest. Had I not been in a state of grief and suffering from guilt, I’d have seen there was no honor in this. CPT Black Ice put the Soviet in a room with a brightly flashing strobe light while playing rock music very loudly. Then he left the room to go to supper. He would leave him there all night and check on him in the morning. We would be celebrating the most successful complete victory in my recollection.

I ordered the best food and drink served to our men. We all ate and drank together and the story was told and retold. The only thing missing was COL SEAL. I asked CPT Black Ice how our prisoner was doing, and he said he would be most cooperative by morning. When the men had finished eating and drinking and had told the story about a hundred times, I bid them all goodnight.

We got some very good information out of the young pilot in the morning. We learned some things about the hierarchy there and their routines that we previously didn’t know. Even more valuable was the information about their commander. COL Kiknadze had ordered COL SEAL killed because he feared him. It was an act of a desperate man. We also learned some information about his own personal habits, especially a place he liked to go alone when he wanted to think. He was an avid mountain climber and usually did this alone, with only two wingmen for security. All of this could be misinformation, so I asked CPT Black Ice to give him sodium pentothal to confirm our prisoner was telling the truth. The young pilot wasn’t lying. I submitted the report to GEN Spears, but omitted the details of the pilot’s interrogation. CPT Black Ice had left the details of the interrogation except for the sodium pentothal out of his report at my request.

GEN Spears called to inform me that he’d read the report. Effective immediately, I was promoted to full colonel and assigned the permanent position of post commander. MAJ Ricochet was promoted to lieutenant colonel. I requested a name change from Cowboy to Kahless, named after the unforgettable warrior icon of the Klingon race from
Star Trek
. He chuckled a bit and granted my request. He also granted my request to rename the post to Camp SEAL and change our unit’s logo to a pair of crossed Colt forty-fives. I went down to the hangar deck and painted a picture of a Klingon warrior on both sides of my tank.

That evening we assembled in our dress uniforms for a post christening ceremony. I kept a case of champagne in my office, which was reserved to celebrate the complete removal of the Soviets here. Today I’d use a bottle of that champagne to perform the ceremony of changing the name of the post to Camp SEAL. The entire post was present in front of the main building complex for the ceremony. MAJ Norsemun, the head of the TOC, in his dress uniform and white gloves, carried the bottle to the front as though he were carrying a ceremonial saber. After a stiff walk to the front of the procession, he handed me the bottle and saluted.

I addressed the men. “I asked GEN Spears if I could rename this post Camp SEAL in honor of our fallen commander and it was granted.” I smashed the bottle on the inside front of the building. “I christen this post Camp SEAL, may her voyage be long.” The men took notice of the references to “her” and “voyage.” I’d always felt this post had the soul of a ship. It made no difference that there was no sea, sails, wind, or quarterdeck under my feet. I felt her soul, and it was the soul of a ship as much as any that sailed the seven seas.

Normally such an occasion should be followed with celebration, but I dismissed the men; who quietly returned to their duties. I made a mental note to have that bottle of champagne replaced soon. It simply wouldn’t do to be short on champagne if I succeeded in killing every Soviet on Mars.

A silent war raged within my soul. Any of the chaplains would try to talk me out of what I was planning. My chief surgeon could put a stop to it altogether with an
unfit for duty
assessment. I avoided making eye contact with any of them whenever possible.

FORGING A SWORD

I couldn’t stop thinking about killing Kiknadze; it ate at my soul like corrosive acid. I wanted to do it at close quarters with my hands and look into his eyes as I took his life, knowing who killed him and why. My recent choice of call signs, the fictional Klingon Kahless, would have no doubt just impaled him with the blade of his bat’letH. I had no idea how I’d get him close enough to use a blade, but I decided to make one nonetheless.

The
Star Trek
story of Kahless was indeed interesting. The Klingon dipped a lock of his hair into a volcano, pulled it out and hammered forged a bat’letH. He quenched the fantasy blade in a lake. I laughed to myself as I contemplated what winds up in science fiction.

First I went to the machine shop and requisitioned Chief Wolverine to release about twenty pounds of alloy-x to experiment with making edged weapons. One thing we knew, this stuff was amazing, and I often wondered if it made a good blade. I’d made my Arkansas toothpick out of some scrap tool steel, but never thought to use alloy-x.

The machine shop had a facility for making and heat-treating tools. Then I went to my locker and pulled out my welding leathers, leather gloves and torch glasses. Growing up on a farm where we did a lot of our own repairs and fabrications, I’d made some knives in our shop back home. We had a bench vice, bench grinder, belt sander, buffer, an anvil and a drill stand close to the forge and heat-treating kiln. I adjusted the anvil’s height to suit me. Since alloy-x had an element in it that was previously not on any elemental chart, I’d have to do some experimenting. Oh, we had data from over twenty years of building ships and weapons with it and the chief had used some to make tool steel. We weren’t completely ignorant of its properties. Alloy-x was dubbed that because of it amazing qualities. Alloy-x was comprised of iron, carbon, a little nickel, and an element we referred to as
element x
. If it didn’t contain element x, it would only be medium carbon-nickel steel with nothing to brag about. But this element constituted fifteen percent of the alloy-x. Although we’d made tools with it, heat-treating it like steel, I felt this metal had a secret to unlock. There were quite a few different temperatures to quench steel at and different quenching mediums, as well as different tempering temperatures.

After three months of experimenting, I had a boot knife that passed all my tests beyond my wildest dreams. Heating the alloy-x and hammer forging it into shape, I then reheated it to a dark cherry red and quenched it to a subzero temperature, and repeated the process again. Finally, I reheated it to dark cherry red and quenched it in brine and tempered the blade to a peacock color. What I was looking at was a metal that didn’t follow conventional metalworking rules. The knife bent ninety degrees in both directions without breaking. I hammered it into a barrel. Finally, I hammered the back of it, causing it to shear a cut a foot long through a steel barrel. After all of this abuse, it still shaved hair off of my arm and afterward easily cut through a free hanging one-inch Manila hemp rope. But I’d also seen earthly steels do all this. So I decided to find out if I could break it. Pulling out a half-inch piece of plate steel, I proceeded to hammer the knife into it, point down with a five-pound sledgehammer. To my amazement, it cut right through, but it stuck. Flipping it over, I pounded the point of it back out with the hammer. I was dumbfounded. The knife dropped out without as much as a chip or crack on the point. Excitedly I called the chief and repeated the test. He was as impressed as I was. After polishing the blade on the muslin wheel of the buffer-grinder, I drilled some rivet holes in the tang and and fixed a red linen Micarta handle to it and gave it to Chief Wolverine

The next step was to make a fearsome weapon out of this amazing metal. I hammered out a double-handled sword, forty inches long from tip to tip, with four blade edges which would have given even the most discriminating Klingon eyes filled with blood lust and fangs showing an appreciative smile. The two outside blade edges were fifteen inches long apiece, and the two inside blades, twelve inches long in front, acted as blade catchers. It had two handle cutouts in the back of the blade to grip it with both hands.

I tempered it the same as I did the boot knife. It took two assistants to handle the bellows so I could get all of the blade edges hot enough to hammer out. Using the inside cutouts of the weapon to achieve the balance I wanted, I wrapped the handle cutouts in strips of leather soaked in resin. The end product looked like a cross between a sword and a flying bat.

We had an old scout that was going to be recycled soon. My attempt to cut through the walls of the craft with my blade and was successful. It was important to me that my new sword to be fearsome in appearance as well. I gave the back of the blade a flat-black anodized finish, but the inside of the cutouts and blade edges I made blood-red. It gave it the look of a bat in flight with bloody wing tips and evil eyes. Its amazing functionality and fearsome look made me smile as I imagined myself impaling or beheading COL Kiknadze.

I completely quit doing katas in my karate class with any other weapon, save my sword. I wrote six katas for my sword, and when I needed to think, I went to the practice room and practiced katas. Real practice was impossible with the blade as it was too deadly, so I had a pair of hard wood replicas made with a heavy layer of rubber on the outside for practice with a partner. Even so, CPT Dutchman and I had to put on helmets and padded gear after we cracked a couple ribs and busted some knuckles.

A technician, whose specialty was upholstering vehicles, made me a sheath out of Cordura nylon and metal snaps to hold it in place beside me in my tank when I flew. I’d purposely disabled the automatic leveling flight controls on my ship so that I could do nose up and down maneuvers. However, this could get hairy at times because sometimes the ship would attempt to roll on its side and need to be manually controlled to keep it upright. The idea of being gutted by my own blade was not very appealing, to say the least. I snapped it firmly in place, and unsnapped and re-snapped it a few times to get a feel for how fast I could retrieve it if needed.

The next six months were very hard fought. I lost six more pilots: Lieutenants Magnum Force, Hard Core, Jolly Roger, Perdition, Crazy Horse and Skywalker. We also lost a lot of ships. I had a close call and was shot out of my tank, but my wingman picked me up before the enemy could take advantage of the situation. Each new transport freighter arrived with new pilots to replace the ones we were losing and I greeted them with a guilty conscience. The next new crop of pilots, Lieutenants Death Before Dishonor, Scourge, Pool Shark, Cross Swords, Pac Man and Janus Dread arrived with a nervous sense of expectation. I promoted CPT Dutchman to major, and he changed his call sign to Killer Instinct. I assigned 1LT Cross Swords as his wingman, and I chose 1LT Janus Dread as mine.