“If it works, we’ll bring away enough supplies to keep us alive for months.”
“If it works!” Ortiz said quietly.
If either man heard, they didn’t acknowledge. Jamison stared at the fighters gathered in the gloom. The word passed along the line. They were doing it. Hit RedCorp so hard, pillage supplies, weapons, food, so they’d understand what they were facing.
“It’ll work. We have to force them to give us what we need. The cost to them needs to be too high not to give it to us. The alternative is we die.”
They called themselves ‘Justice.’ The name and the agenda, justice for the forgotten, for the people tossed aside like so much unwanted chaff behind a combine harvester.
“How many are you sending in?”
Jamison didn’t hesitate. “The whole squad. All of us, they’re all waiting back there, every man and woman who can carry a gun. This is it, Don. We’ve had enough of minor hit and run raids. This is the big one. We don’t have the health, energy, and time for any more of this.”
“Or the last one, more like,” he grumbled.
“No!” He put his hand on Cataldi’s shoulder. For reassurance, or to emphasize the point, “This time, we win. We win big.”
He didn’t see Ortiz behind him, shaking her head. Murmuring, so the people waiting in the cavern couldn’t hear. “Or we die.”
“What about the other cells, Ray?” Cataldi asked him, “What’ll they do if they catch you and force their locations out of you? There’re a few thousand people scattered below the surface of this planet, trying to survive.”
“Ten thousand, by my last count.” He opened his mouth and pointed to a dark spot on the lower jaw, “If they try to take me alive, I bite on it. They won’t get anything out of a corpse.”
Ortiz looked horrified, and he smiled inwardly. Since her husband died in a RedCorp raid, they’d moved closer together. Not yet that close, but she’d made her feelings clear.
Should I encourage her? Tell her the truth; that I feel that same way? No, a onetime widow is enough. Twice would be too much.
“Ray, I didn’t know. Cyanide?”
“Something like that. There’s no other way, Anna. But it isn’t going to happen. We’ll give them a bloody nose, take what we need, and get away free and clear. Stand by, any moment now.”
* * *
It was a good plan. Wearing the same RedCorp biosuits as the crew, they blended with the turnaround squad, guiding the aluminum crates to waiting robotic haulers for unloading, and strolling down the ramp toward the communications tunnel. For Rose Romero, it was her first time on Mars. The weak gravity made her stumble, and either side of her; Cage and Jackson grabbed her arms to support her.
“Thanks, it feels strange. Are we going to make it?”
Luther chuckled. His voice sounded tinny through the helmet speakers. He’d changed the frequencies so they couldn’t be overheard. “No sweat, stay calm. You’ll get used to it.”
She gave him a grateful look. “I doubt that. The sooner we…Cage!”
They emerged from the communications tunnel, security guards, and RedCorp paramilitaries, carrying the dreaded railguns. Weapons that could destroy whatever they pointed at, and they moved with a sureness and precision that meant they’d seen a lot of action.
The leader’s voice rang around the pad. An external speaker, rebels wouldn’t be hooked into the main net. “Halt! Put down your weapons and stay where you are.”
His hand moved away from the gun, and he counted numbers, calculated four troopers.
Too few for an ambush, perhaps an alert watcher noticed something that doesn’t gel. Nothing too serious, it could be a simple mistake, and so far, their body language is relaxed, fingers on triggers, but not taking up final pressure. Not yet.
“Identify yourselves! Which crew are you assigned to?”
He stared back at him, shook his head, and pointed to the helmet. Communications malfunction, he couldn’t reply. Beside him, he could sense Rose and Luther, rigid with shock. The guard scowled, his expression glaring through his faceplate. “You better show me your id tags. Bring ‘em out real slow.”
He bobbed his head and pasted a smile on his face. The powerful railguns were lowered, but by a mere fraction. It would be a close thing. He put his hand down to his belt, close to the gun, inches away.
“Hey, that’s not where you keep your tags. What the hell? Take ‘em!” The rifles swung back up.
“Hit the deck!” At the same moment, he shoved Rose to the ground. Luther was already dropping, the old instincts unforgotten. The guns slammed back, pushed away by the massive recoil. Sold shot whined over their heads, and someone screamed behind them. They’d hit a crewman. A quick glance showed the round had punched through him and then embedded in a wall behind him.
Cage had already clawed out his P-7 Protector pistol, and he swung it up, aimed, and pulled the trigger. The weapon was beautifully constructed from polymer, yet simple to use. With each squeeze, it unleashed a deadly 7mm caseless slug that could punch through flesh and bone with ease. The shot forced the guards off their aim as they panicked and dove for cover. One man was down, a shot that took him in the shoulder, not a killshot, except air was hissing out of his damaged suit, the damage too large for the self-sealing mechanism to fix. If he’d run into the tunnel, he may have help, but he ran into the open. A volley of shots took him down; more guards had mistaken him for a hostile, probably a mercy to prevent a long, drawn out, gasping death. He fell and lay still.
Cage grabbed both by their belts and dragged them up. “Move, move! Get out of here!”
They ran, and more shots cracked past them. The railguns left long white streaks through the air as their solid-slug bullets cut through the thin atmosphere. Great puffs marked the impact on the ground as though artillery shells were crashing down around them.
“Cage!” Rose screamed. She’d never witnessed these kinds of weapons before, and on this alien world they felt like bolts cast down at her from Zeus himself.
“Keep moving!” he answered in a surprisingly calm tone.
There was a single way out, back to the lighter. He hustled them up the ramp, and they flung themselves aside as further shots pursued them. The shooting stopped. They were unwilling to blast the structure of a valuable ship, but more men were coming.
“What are those things?”
From this distance they were little more than blurs, but Cage could see so much more. His enhanced imaging allowed the visual feed from his retinas to be sent to the coprocessors wired into his upgraded body. His brain could see one thing, but the suit of coprocessors could cut apart and analyze footage while he did something else. He blinked and then brought up the enhanced image directly from memory. It wasn’t perfect, but already he knew what it was.
“Recon skiffs. They’ll be here in seconds.”
“What?”
The first burst over a ridge and then dropped back down. The others followed, a trio of small-wheeled robotic vehicles racing across the ground. They drove on large wheels, but the chassis remained open, with a frame arrangement on the top that appeared to serve no purpose. Then they stopped, and shapes emerged and leapt onto them, like fleas leaping onto an animal. Without pausing for even a second, the machines raced off, getting ever closer. There were six Martian soldiers hanging onto the exposed framing, each baring the dreaded railguns. Reinforcements. Sixteen soldiers, and they were out of options.
They looked at him, waiting for a solution, a way out.
I don’t have one. I’m sorry, but we almost made it, got to Mars, and then this.
“What are we gonna do? Where can we go, is there any way we can escape?”
Luther snorted. “Lady, you’re kidding. There ain’t no way out of this. We’re screwed, one hundred percent screwed.”
She looked at him. “Cage?”
He was staring out at the next hub, a kilometer away. Something was happening. A hatch had opened on the surface, and biosuited f
igures poured from the communications tunnel. They were armed, heavily armed, and they were shooting. The suits were a patchwork of different colors, not RedCorp. As he watched, two paramilitaries went down to a hail of gunfire. Whoever they were, he thought of the old maxim. ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’
“We’re not done yet.”
He slipped a new clip of ten bullets into his pistol and nodded toward the sound of the battle.
“Looks like things have changed.”
* * *
“Move out, move out!” Jamison led from the front, as always. Behind him, forty-three rebels spread out. Their targets were easy to find, the few biosuited RedCorp paramilitaries who’d rushed to respond to the new threat. The rebels ignored the shots and put out a storm of fire, forcing them to duck for cover, but they kept shooting. This time, they’d either seize ammunition from the guards, or they’d be dead. Do or die. No middle ground.
Ortiz cried out as an incoming burst grazed the side of her suit. The dreaded hissing of escaping air was brief, as he threw her to the ground and slapped a patch over it. The self-seals on the old suits weren’t reliable, and all of them were used to the perils of Mars.
“Stay down. Wait until we’ve got them on the run.”
She pushed his hand away, rose to one knee, and fired a short burst at a robotic machine speeding toward them. Maybe it was luck, maybe skill, but she clipped a passenger on the first one, who tumbled out and got caught up in the wheels of the second machine. It pulled to the right, and then overturned in a spectacular roll, spilling its occupants out. One man screamed as the framework of the buggy tangled his leg and ripped most of the material away. The other two guards ran.
He catapulted to his feet. It was attack right now, or die. Hit them before they got second wind. “Charge, head for the hub! Secure it before they can send more men.”
They ran. The distance to the lighter was a mere hundred meters, but the security guards had already begun shooting. A rebel went down, and another, but as they closed, every man and woman was shooting. The Martian soldiers from RedCorp as always carried the best weapons, but still they took casualties. In the hail of gunfire, three more RedCorp guards went down, and the rest ran, disappearing into the forest of ships and walkways.
They reached the ship, and Jamison smacked a charge to the airlock door. “Hit the deck, fire in the hole!”
His tone betrayed his time in the military, something that months and years of strife on Mars couldn’t shake off. They hugged the ground, the explosive detonated with a sharp, ‘crack,’ and the door disappeared in a welter of smoke and flame. They charged inside, and the crew made no attempt to fight them. They had their own problems, some breathing into emergency masks, others racing to pull on pressurized biosuits. All but one man already suited as if he’d just come in from the outside. He was dragging a rifle out of an equipment locker until Cataldi put a shot into the locker door.
“Hold it. Don’t do it! We control the ship. Put the gun down…now!”
He didn’t move. “You scum don’t control diddly-squat. When they send in more guards, they’ll blast you into dust. This is my ship.”
“Not anymore, I just took command.” He pulled the trigger. The looted rifle put three shots into the man, and his lifeless fingers let go of the rifle. Cataldi grabbed the gun and ran on, not giving the corpse a second glance as he stepped over it and raced further into the ship. Rebels unloaded, and a chain scuttled between the wrecked door and the maintenance hatch. He kept them moving fast. Time was working against them. Every wasted second was a second for the enemy.
Finally, he decided they’d done enough. Jamison’s troops had herded the remainder of the crew, seven men, into a corner of the hold, and he looked at Ortiz. “Take care of things here. I’ll leave you four of our people. I’ll check out the control room.”
“You’re not planning to take off in this thing.”
He chuckled. “And give the bastards the opportunity to shoot us down? They’d send up everything they have. We wouldn’t get more than a kilometer. No, our fight is under the ground. Hit them and run, disappear where they can’t use their heavy weapons against us. Snipe at them from the shadows. We…”
A rebel put his head around the door. “We got trouble. They know we suckered them, and there’s a bunch of security heading out from the terminal. Five more skiffs, and you can bet the rest will be coming through the tunnel.”
“How many do we have on the walkway?”
“Ten. But RedCorp will have heavy weapons, you know that.”
Just thinking about those railguns sent a shiver down each of their spines.
“I know it. Okay, plant explosives at the entry port. You know what to do.”
“Copy that.”
“Cataldi, how about the unloading?”
His company commander stood back as a line of five rebels carried boxes and equipment past them. They joined the straggling line carrying away the cargo and weaponry to the maintenance hatch, but it was slow.
“We don’t have much time. It’s taking too long. It’s time to wrap this up and get away. Another couple of minutes, and they’ll be all over us.”
“I hear you. Keep them moving. As they dump the cargo in the tunnel, tell them to stay there and be ready to fight them off. Have they cleared the ship?”
“Yeah, it’s just the cargo.”
“Roger that. Don’t…”
“They’re close, Ray.” The girl who’d shouted, Becky Montoya, appeared calm. He knew she was nineteen, making plans to celebrate her twentieth birthday in eleven days’ time.”
“Form a rearguard. Eight should do it. Hold them off until all our people are away.”
“What about you, Ray?”
“I’ll command the rearguard. Ortiz, get out of here. Cataldi, check the ship, make sure our people are moving out.”
“We’re leaving half the cargo,” he said bitterly.
“Better than leaving our people here as corpses. Let’s go, people.”
* * *
“Who are they?”
Romero was staring at the battle raging a kilometer away from their ship. The guards were suddenly diverted by the disturbance across the spaceport, and they moved away to tackle this new threat. But still, there was nowhere to run. He and Luther echoed the answer.
“Rebels, has to be.”
“Rebels attacking the spaceport? Cage, we can use it as a diversion to get away from here.”
“There’s another option.”
He stared at the skiffs racing toward the ship, watched the attackers dashing across the surface, carrying away the cargo, and disappearing into an open hatch. They weren’t going to make it. They were on foot, and the skiffs were closing fast. They fired ranging shots, and then long bursts of gunfire hit the rebel line. Three went down, and the rest tried to pick up the pace. One dropped their load and ran, stumbled, and fell into the path of the gunfire. The rest panicked, and then more rebels poured from the ship. Running toward the hatch, they tried to return fire, but a small rearguard stopped and fired back. A brave, but doomed suicidal, last ditch attempt to protect the escapers.
He realized they were still looking at him, waiting for him to finish. “We join them.”
“But they’re rebels,” she objected, “We came here to find answers, not to fight a war. You don’t know a thing about them.”
“Rose, the moment we went head-to-head with the cops in Westbank, that’s what we were doing, fighting a war.” He scanned the area, looking for means to aid the beleaguered rebels, and his gaze fell on a robotic skiff, abandoned by the guards who’d fled on foot after they tangled with them. “Luther, can you drive it?”
“No!”
Rose was already running toward it. “Get in. Where do you want to go?”
They vaulted into the vehicle, and she was already moving.
“Where are the controls?”
Noah scanned the front of the machine and located the manual control pan
el. It activated and up popped mapping and control data, as well as a touchpad interface. He moved his hand close to the unit, and something seemed to crackle between him and the machine.
“I’ve got it from here. Where are they?”
“There.” She pointed at the skiffs charging down the rebels, “But there’re too many of them.”
“Trust me.”
Using nothing more than his mind, Cage activated the skiff and put them on a direct course toward the enemy, and their formation of fast moving skiffs.
Chapter Six
Tharsis Spaceport, Mars
Hartmann was glued to the viewport, watching the action, his eyes ablaze with fervor. Guzman stood next to him. The two men had shucked off the gloom of the past days. They were soldiers, observing a battle unfold before their eyes. Not a battle maybe, but instead of a hungry family attempting to steal food, this was real, live action. Abruptly, he whirled back to Guzman.
“Master Sergeant, I don’t see our men, where are they? I want them ready to get out there.”
“They’re in the mess, Sir. It’s chow time.”
He looked ready to explode. “Get them on their feet. I want them suited up and ready to move. This could be what we’ve been waiting for.”
“Sir?”
“He’s out there, Guzman. Somewhere. I can smell the bastard. If you were trying to sneak in, wouldn’t you try to do it under cover of an attack, something to divert the guards? Get ‘em moving. He’s gonna show up today. I can smell him.”
“Yes, Sir.”
He swapped gazes with Vos as he stalked out. They were wary of each other, but this time the message was clear. Both men thought Cage would be crazy to try to sneak in when spaceport security was on maximum alert. The Sheriff joined Bowen at a viewport. The action was intense, and a convoy of skiffs screamed across the field to intercept the rebels.
* * *
Cage had scanned the field and noticed a ship taking off from the next hub.
Stupid, they should have locked down the spaceport, but this is Mars. Money talks, and common sense walks.
Last Life (Lifers Book 1) Page 16
