Buck and Wilma came around tight and went through a wide formation barrel roll, flashing through the energy beams aimed at them. They dove directly at the approaching Zhangs, firing steadily with their ancient Madsens.
Within twenty seconds, half the attacking Mongol fighters were in flames or blown out of the sky.
"Break off and re-form," Buck ordered. "Get away from that battlewagon. Here comes Speedboat. . . ."
Blackwell brought in Speedboat like an avenging angel. The giant ship was faster than any in the Mongol fleet, spearheaded by two finger-four formations of Asp fighters. "Ignore that first Mongol battlewagon. It's already coming apart at the seams. Escort fighters, move in against the second ship. It's hurt but still fighting. Let's finish it off"
The Asps went in in perfect formation, firing their cannons in a blistering stream against the second battlewagon. Explosions pounded the hull, breaching the defensive armor.
"Fighters, break off," came the cool voice of Regina Blackwell. "Take up covering escort position."
The attack went smoothly, quickly, precisely as ordered. The approach was clear now, and the huge ship maintained high speed. Speedboat launched four rocket-powered missiles, each a vacuum torpedo with a massive warhead of armor-piercing alloy. As each torpedo sliced into the hull, the incendiaries erupted, sending fire sheets raging through the ship. One torpedo took out the main controls, while another blasted into the drive sec-
A Life in the Future
tion. Two torps missed, but Blackwell had the heavy ship right where she wanted it. Four more torps flashed in; three found their mark. The aft section of the Mongol battlewagon split apart, swinging around to expose the interior of the dreadnought to vacuum. A shower of debris and human bodies erupted into space.
''Speedboat, this is command," came the voice of Admiral Bemis. "Break off contact with the enemy. We'll finish off the other two ships. It's four to two in our favor now. . . ."
They heard Buck's voice. "Asp Leader here. The enemy bat-tlewagons are breaking off engagement. They're thrusting at full power, outbound from Mars."
"Roger, Asp Leader. Speedboat, recommend you pursue, maintaining distance for safety. Launch your torps as opportunity provides."
"Yes, sir," Blackwell replied. ''Speedboat in pursuit."
"Asp Leader, do you read me?" called Bemis.
"I read you loud and clear, sir," Buck answered.
"Commence Phase Three immediately. We've got a break. Ludendorff is already on the surface of the southern hemisphere. He's down in a heavy dust storm, but it's providing cover for his forces. The storm is moving across Mars. Let's take advantage of that weather. Seidman is coming in with the equipment and vehicle carriers. You will rendezvous with him and follow his orders. Confirm, over."
"Asp Leader. Message received. Breaking off engagement and initiating descent. Over and out."
Buck paused a moment, then went to open line. "Asp Leader to all fighters. Wolf Squadron, you're coming down with us. Take up flanking positions three quadrants. All other fighters maintain escort for our heavies. Remain in touch with Speedboat and meet her requirements. Squadron leaders, confirm. Over."
One by one they called in. Wolf Squadron came streaking up into escort formation. The other Asps maintained their finger-four formations and sped off at full speed to rendezvous with the heavy battlewagons commanded by Admiral Bemis.
"All squadron leaders. Let's get down and dirty. On my mark,
gor
They dived planetward. Mars growing swiftly before their eyes as they plunged for the surface. Buck saw the dust storm
Buck Rogers
roiling the southern half of the planet. It was moving steadily northward. It was a lucky break. If they could reach their rendezvous point just ahead of the storm, while they still had good visibility, they would descend into a deep ravine, three miles wide, that sliced the surface in a northwesterly direction.
From here on, it was going to be a bare-knuckles battle.
Chapter 22
To minimize the time spent in their drop to the planet, they descended to the Martian surface in a nearly vertical dive. The Asp fighters went down at reduced power, falling with gravity to reduce propulsion emissions and confuse Mongol radar and laser finders. Nose to tail, they would appear on a scope as a single long line, which didn't fit any recognition pattern locked into the Mongol computers. Dust enveloped them in orange haze as they slid into the boiling dust storm making its way across the planet.
Timing and keeping the Mongols guessing were critical factors now. Immersed in the dust, the Asps fired needle-shaped probes outward through an arc of three hundred and sixty degrees, creating the image of a wide host of craft flying downward. The EM decoys reflected full-size Amerigo spacecraft. Four miles high, one Asp triggered a following force field that gave the appearance of an entire fleet descending. Then two more decoys were fired to the north and south to give the appearance of three separate fleets descending.
"Wilma, confirm your surface scan to see if it matches our computer graphs for the landing area," Buck called.
"We're right on target. Leader," she called back. She rattled off latitude and longitude coordinates, knowing full well that they were being monitored by the Mongol and Tiger Men
Buck Rogers
defenses. What the enemy didn't know is that the coordinates were false and would be converted into proper coordinates by a preset computer code. In the Asp fighters, nav consoles showed the pilots that their course was right on target. They were flying blind now, their Inertron generators kicking in with increasing power to slow their descent.
"Leader from Two," Wilma called. "We just crossed the Blue Smokies. Time to visit the bourbon plant."
The nav computer immediately presented their true coordinates. They had just crossed over a ridge of mountains; at the eastern end of the ridge, a smoking volcano spewed thick smoke into the air, mixing with the dust storm to create an electrostatic nightmare for any scanning devices.
Now they descended slowly, spreading out close enough to the surface for their radar to penetrate the dust and give them a true reading. "Dead Man's Gulch straight ahead," Buck called to his fighters. Let the Mongols pick up their transmissions. They couldn't make heads or tails from their coded speech.
Dead Man's Gulch widened out as its sides decreased in height until the Asps lowered gently into the middle of the great cleft in the Martian surface. Many thousands of years before, a river had coursed violently through this area, washing away top-soil and rocks and leaving behind a level surface at the bottom of the ravine. Ten miles ahead of their landing, the western slope of the ravine had collapsed, leaving a steep but navigable ramp for ground vehicles to traverse. If treads or wheels couldn't handle the slope, the vehicles awaiting them here under Big Mike Seid-man could always use rocket booster engines or grapples to lock into the higher elevations. On the ground. Buck ordered three Asps to maintain immediate takeoff readiness. He donned powerful glasses that pierced the dust as if it were merely a slight fog. Arrayed along one wall of the ravine were multi-manned vehicles for skimming along over the Martian surface as well as an astonishing convoy of tracked and wheeled vehicles, armed with a formidable array of weapons.
Buck met immediately with Seidman. Gone were the stars that indicated his rank as a Field Marshal. Instead, he wore desert fatigues, electronic boots, and carried enough personal firepower to take on an armored column single-handed.
They shook hands. "Hell of a job you did upstairs," Seidman
A Life in the Future
greeted him warmly. "Between you and the rest of the group, you've got them hopelessly confused."
"Thanks," Buck acknowledged, "but save it for everyone on the team. They played ball like they'd been doing this for years."
"We tested that finger-four formation of yours on the ground. It works just as well for ground armor, especially in dust like this."
Buck admired the array of hardware in the ravine. "
Tell me. Field Marshall—"
"The name's Mike. No rank from here on."
"Got it. How did you ever get all this stuff in here? I'd have thought you'd stand out like a Christmas tree."
"Near Mongol headquarters there's a serious underground fault. It leads right through the center of the Tiger Men as well. We put a cyclonic disrupter—that thing that keeps bursting every few minutes for several hours—right down the hole. The damn thing hit a soft spot, and they had one very neat and angry volcanic eruption on their hands. They were too busy taking care of that to notice us. We also planted a couple of exploding decoys on the Phobos moon to further divert their attention, and here we are."
"How far to the Cydonia Plain?" Buck asked.
"A hundred and six miles as the crow flies, if a crow could fly through this dust. We've already mapped out the best course to follow, but it could get pretty nasty the closer we get to that monolith of the face. The Mongols and Tiger Men have been moving up their power generators. They'll gravlift them to their big ships for transport to Venus. At least that's the way we've got it figured. They're armed to the teeth in that area. It's a funny thing, though. They must figure we shot our wad out in space, because they don't seem worried about anybody tackling them on the ground."
"That makes sense from their viewpoint," Buck said. "After all, they're the big boys here. We're interlopers and outgunned."
"We'll see about that." Seidman grinned.
"Do we have wind generators to keep this dust storm perking and keep us under cover?" Buck asked. "From out there in space, it looks as if the storm covers the whole bottom half of Mars. There's some kind of thermal effect involved, so even the infrared scanners are confused."
Buck Rogers
"We won't need to help nature with the dust storm, Buck. For a planet with an onionskin atmosphere, that's a hell of a wind blowing this stuff."
Buck adjusted his breathing helmet. "There's enough nitrogen in the atmosphere to measure between four and seven pounds per square inch. That's like mountaintops on Earth."
"Yeah, sure," Mike Seidman said tiredly. "And when's the last time you encountered a dust storm atop Mount McKinley? Look, we'll have time to jabber all we want when this is over. Right now let's get our people on the road."
"Wait one minute, Mike. We sent up those new oxygen systems. I hope they got here in time."
Seidman looked puzzled for a moment. "I haven't seen anything different from what we've always had. Buck."
"You wouldn't. You know Captain Ardala Valmar?"
"The lady sea dragon? Sure I do. She's a hell of an officer."
"Ardala developed a new nasal insert," Buck explained. "It's oxygen in solid form, tremendously compressed. Whenever any gas passes over it, it releases pure O two. You stick a container in each nostril—"
"Just what we need when we sneeze."
"Mike, stay with me on this. The thing releases oxygen according to the inhalation process. Each of these things is about half an inch long. The chemical catalyst in the gadget releases normal oxygen flow for about ten hours. When you don't need it, it simply permits ambient oxygen to pass through it. My point is, we don't need the masks and systems as long as we have these available."
Seidman rubbed his chin, thinking hard. "It would give us a real advantage over the Mongols. The Golden People and the Tiger Men have adapted to local temperatures and air pressure. When we wear the masks, they look down on us as some sort of weaklings. Seeing us without all that crud will give them some food for thought. It also ought to drive the Mongols nuts. I'll check. You make sure your people are in their assigned vehicles. In the meantime, I want to talk to that Japanese guy who just landed."
"Who is it?" Buck felt a cold chill down his back.
Seidman tapped a scroll. "Name is Takashi Inoyue. Apparently he's spent a lot of time with old Benjamin Barney in special ops."
A Life in the Future
"Mike, what is he doing here on Mars?"
"It's all a surprise to me, Buck. We got a coded message from Black Barney with some strange story about Inoyue having information about a major subterranean water source here on Mars. According to the scuttlebutt, there's even a deep underground river ten, maybe fifteen miles beneath the surface, and—"
Buck couldn't remain silent. "Hold on, Mike. How could Inoyue know about that?"
Seidman shrugged. "There could be a renegade among the Tiger Men—you know, someone gets ticked off with his own people and sells out to us if we promise to make him the big cheese after we clean their clocks. It could be anjrthing. Besides, I've got more important things to worry about than some water source. That comes later. Right now, we've got to keep the Mongols from throwing us off the planet. Got it?"
"Got it," Buck said. But there were holes in the story. He would have to talk with Dawn Noriega and Wilma. Together, with their special talents, they might be able to figure out what in blazes was going on here.
"Forget about Inoyue, Buck. First things first. We've got to get these troops up to the Cydonia Plain. Aren't you the one who told the story about the Tiger Men's plans to help the Mongols transport some huge power drives to Venus?"
"I sure was. Still am," Buck answered.
"And we're supposed to stop them before they can get them off-planet?"
"That's the idea."
"Then let's get with it. I've heard some disturbing reports that the Mongols have some heavy antigrav equipment to lift those things and get them sunward."
Buck nodded. "Right on, Mike. The way I look at it, we'll use ground vehicles as far as we can with our combat troops and weapons to the Cydonia Plain. We won't really know what's going on there until we can eyeball the whole thing ourselves."
"What about the new jetpack flybelts?"
"They're limited in range and endurance," Buck explained. "We won't use those until we're close in and see what we're up against."
"Good enough. Let's get this show on the road,"
Buck Rogers
Things didn't work out quite the way they planned. The dust storm increased in intensity, blanketing the world about them with thick dust that began to choke up their ground vehicles. They were groping their way along slowly. The lead vehicles, towing huge tank trucks, sprayed cryogenic mist ahead of the convoy. The super-cold gas formed the dust into clumps that fell slowly to the surface, clearing visibility somewhat.
Wilma drove a half-track with Buck at her side. A navigator behind them tried to match the aerial photos they had with the computer maps of the Martian surface. Their visibility was poor at best.
"Buck, this is foolhardy," Wilma told him, her face grim. "As soon as we can see a few hundred feet in front of us, the wind shifts and we're blindfolded again. The ground is shifting beneath us. The ground we're traveling over consists of nothing more than deep dust pits. Six vehicles have already slipped down those slopes. We got the crews out of two that couldn't be recovered, but we lost one entire crew. They're trying to get them out now."
"We can't wait for them," Buck said coldly. He had a pained but stubborn expression on his face. "The longer we take to get to Cydonia, the more likely we are to come under attack. What about the sonar systems?"
"They're not reliable in this dust. We're getting bouncebacks from thick concentrations of dust. It's almost impossible to tell what's dust and what's the side of this ravine. Then we have all that down-sloping of sand that's taking boulders with it. The cryogenic fog that clumps this stuff works only for a short distance. We're barely crawling."
"And at any minute we could go right over a ravine we don't even know is there," Buck said sourly. "Get me Seidman."
"Mike here. That you, Buck?"
"Affirmative. Look, Mike, you know what we're fighting out here, and—"
"I know. I recommend you take a scout force and go out with the new jetpacks. You can spread out, maneuver easily, and you can carry those assault rifles. They'll work against whatever we run into. Be on the lookout for some enemy flying scou
ts. I've got
A Life in the Future
Dawn Noriega up here, and she's sensing something in the air, but she can't tell what it is."
"Stand by, Mike."
Buck turned to Wilma. "Relax. Let go, woman. See what you can pick up."
Wilma placed her hands on each side of her head, closing her eyes. "Confusion . . . darkness. I get a feeling of... of something rapacious. Never felt that before. Ask Mari to come forward."
Wilma and Mari sat close together, heads touching, trying to receive whatever emotions were being broadcast from what lay ahead. "Buck, tell Noriega that Mari and I are sensing the same thing. The thoughts, or whatever they are, are almost primeval. It's more like instinct than thought, but they definitely are airborne."
Buck relayed the message. "Buck, Noriega here. They're right. No coherent thoughts. The only image I'm picking up is . . . well, biting and eating."
"That makes a hell of a lot of sense," Buck said with open sarcasm. "Mike, I recommend you keep Noriega with you, scanning for anything she can pick up. I'll take Wilma, Mari, and Adrian, plus two complete assault crews. Those new belts should work well here."
The belts had been modified for Martian surface operations. On Mars, everyone weighed only thirty-eight percent of Earth weight. The Inertron strips were nearly three times more effective. They could be used for hovering as well as slow flight, but each belt had a pack of neutrium fuel on a slowly unwinding spool. In the small thrust chamber of the jetpack, the neutrium was bombarded with a ruby laser and instantly converted to tremendous heat and pressure. The pressure was ejected from twin nozzles that gave the wearer the ability to fly swiftly and maneuver as quickly as the wearer could twist his or her shoulders.
Buck Rogers- A Life in the Future Page 31
