Last Life (Lifers Book 1)

by Thomas,Michael G.

  “You should leave with the others. Make a new life, maybe find a way back to Earth. This was a mistake.”

  “I don’t care. I’m coming with you. That’ll make two of us against the odds.”

  “Three.” Luther Jackson stepped into the room, “Count me in.”

  “Whatever you plan to do, make it quick,” Jamison snapped.

  He nodded. “See you in hell, Ray.”

  He smiled at the old Lifer’s battle cry. “See you in hell. Grab some rifles on the way out, you’ll find the armory second on the left. And make sure you wear your helmets. They’ll blast the tunnel wide open to suck out all the air. If you’re not already dead, you soon will be. One more thing.” He handed each of them a blue scarf, “Your suits look the same as RedCorp. Wear one of these, and don’t lose it. I don’t want any friendly fire incidents.” He grinned, “Blue on blue.”

  “Copy that.”

  He led the way out into the tunnel. They had to thread their way through throngs of people, some walking, some running, a few children clutching at their parent’s hands, faces filled with tears.

  They found old rifles and ammo in the armory cavern and began moving out to meet the invaders. The weapons were not high-tech, but they were useable, and probably looted stocks from one of the many PanAm failed invasions.

  The location of the breach had to be in one direction. The enemy was blasting away the airlock doors one by one, and the noise of the explosions echoed down the tunnels. He ran and sensed they were keeping pace behind him. The messenger had been wrong. They didn’t have ten minutes. More like five, and as he rounded a corner, a huge explosion blew out part of the tunnel roof, and troopers began abseiling down from the surface. At the same time, another explosion sounded further along the tunnel. They were coming at them from all sides.

  “Rose, Luther, back up twenty paces. Hit the deck and start shooting. I’ll handle them as they break through the last airlock door. Check your helmets, and make sure your air supply is on.”

  “But, Cage…”

  “Do it!” he snarled. The time for discussion had ended, as the last airlock disintegrated with a shattering roar. Through the smoke and dust, they were there. A horde of red biosuited RedCorp troopers, and as he dove to the ground, the shooting started. Bursts of fire sliced through the air over his head, each shot blasting chunks of rock from the wall.

  Cage instinctively hit back, knowing full well it was best to strike at the heart of the attack, and fast. He pulled the stock of the lightweight R-22 Stryker to his shoulder and opened fire. He pulled the trigger on full auto, putting short bursts of 7mm fire into the attackers. He was lucky. The tunnel at this point was barely wide enough for two men to come at him at once. The first two went down, making an obstacle for those behind to climb over. But they tried. Two more men clambered over the bodies of their comrades, showering him with gunshots as they advanced, and he pulled the trigger again. One fell, his body riddled with bullets, and his armored suit torn beyond repair. The second trooper took a bullet to shoulder, staggered, and kept coming as his suit began to reseal.

  He ran at Cage, and inside his helmet, his lips were drawn back in the rictus of a snarl. He had to switch his aim. A RedCorp soldier knelt behind the bodies of his fallen comrades and dropped a heavy railgun into position. Cage emptied his clip, and the force of his gunfire smashed through into the gunner, so his body joined those he’d used as a shield. But the wounded man still came at him, and he launched himself at Cage in a desperate effort to close with his enemy and rip him apart with his bare hands.

  The gun was dry, and he had no choice but to drop the rifle and snatch out the pistol. Too late, the RedCorp trooper used his own rifle like a club and smashed it into Cage’s arm. The blow had no effect on his cybernetic limb, but the shock was enough for him to lose the grip on the pistol. Hands closed around his neck, and a boot slammed into his leg. Again, he had no flesh and bone for the blow to injure, and his opponent’s eyes widened in astonishment.

  “Problem?”

  Cage seized the advantage and drove a fist into the man’s face shield. The hard, driving power of reinforced bone and powerful actuators cracked the toughened material. Air hissed from the ruined suit, and the hands left Cage’s neck. The trooper had other, much more serious problems. The faceplate couldn’t self-seal, and he clutched at the split material, trying, and failing to stop the catastrophic loss of air. Cage ignored him. He was finished.

  The ferocity of the violence by just one man shook the Martian troopers. They were the best soldiers on Mars, but clearly they’d never been faced by such heavy losses, and in so short a time. Two held back, and then more joined them as they deployed extra weapons. The gunfire shredded the passage, but Cage had already moved back behind the next bend. The shooting went on for nearly a minute until at last it stopped, and the troopers inched their way inside, looking for his body.

  Wait…just a little longer.

  There were ten of them in the narrow corridor now, and they were spread out checking the bodies.

  Now!

  Cage lifted the rifle from where it hung limp on its sling and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He’d completely forgotten about running dry, and now he was going to pay the price.

  Idiot. You’re out.

  After all that training and experience, and he’d not checked his weapon. It was a rookie mistake, and it could cost him. The trooper turned to face him; his eyes wide open as a weapon struck him in the face like a club. More RedCorp troopers came screaming through the tunnel, driven by an urgent need to slaughter the single man who stood between them and victory. He bent down and ripped a railgun from the frozen fingers.

  Nice, very nice.

  He’d seen them before but never used one. It was the infamous M15 long barrel RDI manufactured railgun rifle. There were two barrel-shaped sections, one above the other, and with a slight gap between them giving it a sideways fork arrangement. At the rear of the gap were the breech and a preloaded 20mm razor-sharp tungsten slug ready to fire.

  “Hey, over here!”

  He yelled to the Martians while taking aim. The gun thumped into his shoulder as it sent the slug into the first man. The velocity was so great it punched through and carried on into the next two before embedding in the wall. Cage shot repeatedly, but with just twelve shots the gun soon ran dry. No sooner did he fire the last shot and a round nicked his shoulder. He felt the impact as enemy fire glanced nearby, and twisted and turned to avoid the worst of it. Occasionally, a shattered bolt or piece of rock would damage or tear his armored suit, and it would then automatically reseal. Cage found another discarded weapon, lifted it, and took aim just as another railgun slug slammed into the weapon. It exploded in front of him, sending shards of metal and plastic into his body. The impact left him stunned, and his vision blurred. For a second he thought it was over. The red-suited troopers pressed forward, guns blazing, and died in a withering hail of bullets from behind him.

  What?

  “Cage, keep your head down!” Jamison’s voice, and when he turned, Ortiz was with him. Behind him, Rose and Luther were blasting the abseiling troopers. The narrow shaft forced them to come at them single file. They came, and they died. Something flew overhead toward the enemy and exploded a hundred meters further down the tunnel. A few hostiles hesitated and looked scared as a cascade of rock tumbled down. A rebel had managed to launch a missile, and for a short time, it stemmed the avalanche of enemy soldiers. Yet they weren’t out of trouble, it was just a brief respite before they came at them again.

  Cage put the agony of the multiple wounds out of his mind, rose to one knee, and called out for a weapon. A Stryker carbine sailed through the air, and he caught it with one hand. It felt like a handgun in the low gravity of Mars, and without pausing, he turned it on the enemy and started blasting. He could make out a long line of hostiles to their front, about thirty in all. In the center, a macabre no-man’s land of bodies, nine or ten in all. Yet despite their ove
rwhelming advantage in numbers, they hesitated, and he saw an opening. Crawled forward, firing short bursts to keep them back until he reached the wall of dead. He turned, and the other two were right behind him.

  “We can stay behind this cover and hold our position. Keep shooting until we kill them all. How’re we off for ammo?”

  It wasn’t a conscious decision, but he’d taken command. Jamison acknowledged it with a wry grin. “We’re good, and we’ve got people bringing up more. You did a fantastic job, Cage. We couldn’t have held without you.”

  “We’re not done yet. Find a space and start shooting.”

  Ortiz squeezed between them, pushing the barrel of her rifle into a loophole made by two bodies locked together in death, and they opened fire. The enemy commander was signaling his men to keep moving ahead, and now they had cover of their own. More bodies. The fight became a war of attrition and firepower, both sides equally matched. Unable to bring more than two or three guns to bear, it became a slugging match, and neither side could win the advantage. Cage stopped shooting to slam a new magazine into his rifle, and recalled the messages they’d sent out.

  “Colonel, how long do we have before the others arrive?”

  He answered immediately, as if he’d been updating that calculation every minute. “Three hours and twenty-two minutes. Assuming they come.”

  “Will they come?”

  “You want the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “I haven’t got a clue. Keep shooting.”

  He squeezed the trigger, while laughing at the absurdity of the situation. At the same moment, the enemy commander waved a hand to signal a new attack. They charged. Some men fell almost as they got to their feet, but those behind pressed ahead for the last few paces, and there were too many.

  They should have died there and then, but behind them, someone shouted, “Make space, make space! Hit the floor!”

  A rebel in a much-repaired biosuit pushed between them. He clutched the missile launcher and fired another missile that ‘whooshed’ at the forefront of the RedCorp position. And missed, exploded meters the other side of them. Their leader glanced around at his dead and dying. Wounded men panicking as the colossal damage in their suits rendered them as airtight as hessian sacking. As they lay choking out their last, he did the unexpected. Cage saw his lips move, and it didn’t need any skill to understand what he’d shouted, the order to charge.

  The attackers stumbled on the slippery blood spilled on the floor as they raced into the battle. Inside his helmet, all he could hear was the sound of their internal comms, shouted orders, the rebels trying to fight back but terrified by the sudden onslaught. The Perspex visors of the RedCorp fanatics a window on their fanatic fury; their mad, desperate rush, piling up more and more bodies, carried them to the edge of the rebel bulwark, and they were over it. The fight became hand-to-hand, an old-fashioned slugging match. An underground battle where the much vaunted, mighty Martian technology became secondary to the war fury of the fighters.

  He sensed a rising fury inside of him, and the red rage of battle carried him into the heart of the enemy ranks. He heard someone screaming and realized it was him. It was an unconscious act, fired by the surging fury inside him. A fury built up by years and years of abuse, imprisonment, and torture. He swung his rifle like a club, smashing it against the helmet of a man who’d stumbled.

  “Drive them back!” yelled one of the rebels.

  Cage joined in, shouting from somewhere deep inside his body, an ancestral, prehistoric bellow that came from inside his soul. The war shout rose to a scream of triumph as his fist smashed against the visor of his helmet. This time he delivered the blow with such force the clear plastic dissolved into tiny fragments. The air disappeared in the first few seconds. The fist didn’t stop with the plastic. It reached the man’s head, and blood sprayed into the air. He jerked his fist free and swung it again at another trooper, clawing at him, trying to reach him to take him apart. He knew nothing but a furious anger and desperation.

  The years of agony and imprisonment forgotten, it was payback time. Then they were moving forward. He was leading as the hostile elements fell back, pressing against those behind, unable to contain the insane, maddened Lifer. Accurate and incisive bursts of fire aided him from the handguns of Jamison and Ortiz. There wasn’t enough space in the melee to use rifles. Gradually, they beat them back, and the frightened, demoralized Martians ran out of space, with nowhere left to run, nowhere to go. Their attack had floundered, and they backed against the tumbled roof. Thousands of tons of rock blocked their escape. The three rebels waded in, blades in the moonlight, blood black as pitch, and wild screams through ruined helmets and pressure suits as they cut down the enemy.

  They were still outnumbered and outflanked. The RedCorp contingent that had dropped down the shaft was trapped between flanking fire from both sides. From their own men firing at Cage’s desperate battle, and from Rose and Luther’s last ditch defense. They weren’t alone. More rebels had joined them, and slowly they pushed the hostiles back, until they began to climb back up the shaft they’d blasted to escape the relentless fire.

  Cage, Jamison, and Ortiz, were checking the last of the bodies, making sure there were no fakers waiting to ambush them when they turned their backs. A shout in their comms system made them look along the passage. Luther was waving at them to return, and the missile shooter knelt next to him. The missile pointed upward to the breach in the tunnel roof, and the next step wasn’t hard to work out. He’d seal off the breach with a missile, at least enough to give them some time. Time they desperately need. The one word galvanized them into action.

  “Run!”

  They ran, retreating through the airlock. Jamison made sure they were out of harm’s way. The missile streaked away, the shooter ducked inside, and he closed it with a loud click. Not quite fast enough, the shockwave slammed into them, and then the door sealed, and they waited while the ground heaved and rocked. Waited some more, until the vibrations eased, and they were looking at him.

  “What?”

  Jamison smiled. “If I hadn’t seen that, I wouldn’t have believed it. What do we do now?”

  “You’re in charge.”

  “No. I can’t fight the way you do. It’s your call, Cage.”

  He was back on the ridge in command of his Lifer unit. His call. He couldn’t bring back the dead, couldn’t make it right what’d happened before, but he could do what he’d always do, and then some.

  “We fight. Pull back to the next airlock seal, and we’ll keep up a fighting retreat. We can slow them down if we’re smart.”

  He took a quick series of breaths, his chest still pounding from the excitement and thrill of the fight.

  “Do you have a way to booby trap the tunnel? We’ll bring thousands of tons of rock down on their heads for every chunk of territory they gain. It’s called scorched earth. Enough to buy us the time we need until the reinforcements arrive.”

  “It’s a plan,” Jamison agreed. He shouted to the rebels waiting behind him. “Pull back. Pull back. When we’re through, take off your helmets to save your air. We’ll need every last cubic millimeter of it later, when they get through.”

  They retreated past the airlock door and removed their helmets, once they confirmed the tunnel still contained air and the pressure was fully equalized. The rebels slumped down exhausted, and Rose pulled down his suit to look at his new wounds. “You’re bleeding, Cage. You’ll have to get to the medical bay.”

  “No time. Seal it. Get me a dressing. I’ll manage.”

  “It could kill you if you don’t get treated,” she warned. Then she stopped and realized what she’d said. They both laughed, until a rebel came through and handed Jamison a message. He read it and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he joined them.

  “News from one of the other groups, they’ve been delayed. This isn’t a local attack. It’s all over the planet. RedCorp and the other corporations are trying to wipe us out at a single s
troke.”

  “How long?”

  He sucked in a breath. “Seven hours, it could be more.” At that moment, they heard the whirring noise from some distance away. He frowned, “As if that isn’t enough, they’ve deployed more crawlers. Shit.”

  He stared at Cage. “Any thoughts on how we can handle this?”

  He didn’t answer at first. They’d come for answers, and instead, a yawning chasm of uncertainty and death had opened up beneath them. Finally, he looked up. “I just don’t know. No matter how many of them we kill, they send in more. Then there’s whatever they have outside, plus the drones, and God knows what else waiting for us.”

  “You’re saying…”

  “Yeah, I’m saying we’re screwed.”

  Chapter Eight

  RedCorp Headquarters, Tharsis, Mars

  Vos and Bowen were uneasy in the red biosuits, identical to those worn by the brutal RedCorp security troops. Splashed with the logos of RedCorp, they were like a badge of surrender to an enemy power. The Sheriff recalled his service in the First Martian War. He’d seen plenty of men die, men he’d got to know well. If they could see him now, they’d be turning in their graves. Somehow, it was as if he and Bowen had turned their coats and joined the enemy. Yet their options were limited to one. Hartmann had insisted they assist the coming assault with a personal assignment.

  “You’ll go out with Rob and help him home in on his target. When this is all over, I want to see Cage’s body on a slab, and, I want it done nice and legal.” He sneered, “After all, you are a lawman.”

  He was careful to keep the irony out of his voice, “Yes, General.”

  “Right. Director Laszlo will command the offensive, so you’ll consider yourselves under his orders. Your mission will take place underground. That’s where you’ll find the rebels. They’re like rats, don’t like coming up onto the surface, but Rob will deal with them, and he’ll handle Cage. His programming is to make it look good. We don’t want people saying we executed a former war hero.”