“I’m trying to make you see sense. Don’t you get it? A lot of them are going to die out here, and there’s plenty already dead. When the survivors begin to recover, it’s not my home. I’m just a visitor. An Earther. One day, your people will rise up in a mass, concerted attack, and on that day they’ll need one of their own to lead them. That’s not me. That’s you. People like you, Anna Ortiz, and Cataldi. Go! Make sure you reach the tunnels, and when you’ve recovered, come back out and hit them, hit them hard.”
He hesitated and looked around at the mass of RedCorp troopers, surveyed his own people, hesitating and waiting for him to give the order. Attack and die, or retreat and live. Finally, he came to a decision and put out his hand. “I’ll do it, Cage. But remember this, I’ll make damn sure no one ever forgets what you’re doing.”
“Make them suffer. Make them regret the day they ever fought against that banner. The harder you fight, the better chance you’ve got of getting more to join the fight. That transport pilot was just one, and more will follow.”
He pointed at the ragged piece of biosuit, patched and ragged, but by some miracle still fluttering from the aluminum strut.
Jamison grinned, then shouted at his men, “Pull back. Pull back. All of you, we’re going back underground.”
A few men cheered. There were a couple of shouts of derision, and Cataldi appeared from nowhere, his face through the faceplate fierce and angry. “Dammit, Ray, we were winning there. After Dave Mingus flew that transport into their troops, we had them on the run.”
“It couldn’t last, Don. We’re leaving. Believe me, it’s our one hope of victory. Noah Cage has brought us this far, and he’ll cover our retreat. Get your men moving, before I remove you from your command.”
He stared at Jamison for long moments and then turned away. He began shouting commands at his troops, and then the rebels were streaming toward the fissure. The bemused Martians began to snap out of it, realizing the enemy who’d hurt them so badly was running. A few shots spat toward the retreating fighters. Three went down, two dead, one wounded, and several stopped to pick them up and hurried to catch up with the others. Then Cage opened fire.
The mission would be final. No chance of escape, although every chance of doing serious damage. No peace with honor, but war with honor. He spun into action like a twister racing across the prairie. Running, firing, darting in and out of knots of RedCorp troopers who frantically tried to counter the devil in their midst. He was too fast for them, and they were still stunned. He emptied his railgun, snatched up another from a fallen RedCorp soldier, and fired again.
It was an insane race to see who would reach out and take death by the hand first. Five men formed a blocking line, kneeling on the dust to pour gunfire toward him. Round after round smacked around him, but his mad rush threw off their aim, and his return fire stunned them. He was out of control, and they knew it.
Just as the incoming fire roared toward him, he mentally commanded his limbs into a final, despairing boost. By some miracle, his emergency override was still functioning, and the legs responded with enough extra power. He sprang three meters into the air, and a score of shots creased the air beneath him. Some found a target, those unfortunate Martians who were behind him. Someone screamed for them to stop firing, and the shots died away. Too late, as he descended from his powered leap, he was already emptying his gun. Then he landed, tripped on his smashed limbs, and staggered. By an effort of will, he regained his feet, and he was still running. He snatched up another rifle and continued firing.
If he hadn’t been in the center of the remainder of the RedCorp contingent, it wouldn’t have been possible. Yet it dawned on them they were about to lose even more men. A single mad Lifer faced them, bent on killing as many as he could take with him. They had no choice but to open fire indiscriminately, to take down their own people if they were to survive and stop him. They fired again, and the end came almost as an anti-climax, when he was descending from another power jump.
“Stop him!” yelled one of them, just as a burst from a hidden rebel cut down the officer. A storm of gunfire hit the ground just ahead of him, then tracked back, and struck his lower leg. When he landed, he fell, and all power to his right leg disappeared, shut down, wrecked. The left leg struggled to compensate, diverting the energy source to try and give him enough boost to get up. It wasn't working. That limb was also badly damaged.
Keep…moving.
A slug glanced the top of his shoulder, less than a centimeter from where he’d taken the earlier wound. It spun him around in a strange, macabre dance. The pain was like a dark blanket descending over him, choking him, sucking the breath out of his body, and with it his strength. He passed out, knew he was dying. Two images were at the forefront of his mind. The first, the scattered bodies over the Martian plain, testament to what they’d achieved. Most of them wore red biosuits, displaying the logo of RedCorp. So he knew this day they’d inflicted such terrible damage on the evil corporation that they’d never recover. The foundations of their strength were the terror they inflicted on those whom they refused to accept within their society.
The second image was Rose Romero. The girl he’d met during those frantic hours in Westbank, who’d come with him to Mars to get answers, and with whom he’d fallen in love. He’d never see her again, and if his own death would cause him little grief, he couldn’t say the same of losing Rose. She was a reason not to die. Yet, he couldn’t survive. He’d chosen the other path. It was time to join his comrades, the men and women of Mars Recon II that he’d left here on Mars so long ago.
It’s time to die.
* * *
Security Director Vladimir Laszlo breathed a sigh of relief when the mad rebel went down, hit by a hail of slugs from three directions. He left his PDX transport and walked across the surface to inspect the body now that the bulk of the fighting was over. Soldiers moved aside and allowed him to look down at the victim in the patched, red biosuit, and as he expected, it was Noah Cage. The man General Hartmann had come all the way to Mars to kill, and had made such a hash of it.
“So, there he is, the last of the Lifers on Mars. Good riddance.”
Now he, Director Laszlo, had beaten him. Although when he cast his eyes around the surface, he shuddered on seeing what it had cost to push back the rebels and to kill Cage. The butcher’s bill was high. Scores of bodies, there could be as many as a hundred. They’d won a victory, sure, but a pyric victory, and the price would be steep. This battlefield would haunt them for a long time. Could even destroy them, unless he took steps to make sure it didn’t happen.
Then he remembered his daughter, Captain Alicia Laszlo, who’d been at the forefront of the attack with her husband Colonel Joshua Hartmann. He recalled his relief when the suicidal attack by the transport had destroyed most of Hartmann’s force, yet at the last moment, it missed them. He searched the bodies to find her, but she found him.
“Father.”
She was walking toward him, and her suit appeared undamaged.
“I saw you knocked over by the explosion. You’re not hurt?”
“No.” She shrugged, “I don’t know about Joshua, stupid bastard.”
Her expression was eloquent, and Laszlo wondered when the marriage had soured. And why. “When that ship came down, he froze. We were in the middle of an attack. He should have kept going, killed all of them. Stupid.”
He put his arm around her. “He did his best. You’ll both have another chance, just as soon as this is over. We’ll have to put more troops into the field, and it’ll take a little longer, that’s all.”
“It’s just,” she looked at the nearest bodies, “Such a waste. These were the best we had, the best on the planet. Think of the cost to recruit and train more troops. Those bastard rebels, we should have killed them all a long time ago. Exterminate them; they’re nothing more than parasites. We could use gas. It’s been an emergency contingency before.”
He pretended he hadn’t heard that.
He looked around. Colonel Hartmann was behind him.
“Yeah, you made it. That’s good news.”
“Most of my men died.”
A shrug. “Shit happens, Colonel. You need to talk to your wife. She’s real pissed. My guess is she’ll want to go after them right away and kill every last one of them.” He paused for effect, “You know what she’s like when she gets that way. A real firebrand.”
He kept his face expressionless. “I know what she’s like. What are your orders…Director?”
“Orders? Pull them all back. We’ll regroup, and go after them again at a later date. When it’s over, I’ll approve the funding to rebuild your unit. Stupid letting them be caught out by that transport.”
“Yes. Perhaps we should shoot down every one of the ships on this rock, just in case a rebel is flying it.”
Laszlo shot him a hard look. “I’ll forget I heard that because your father is a friend. Now…go talk to your wife.”
“Is that an order?”
“Damn right it is.”
“Yes, Sir.” He sketched an immaculate salute and went after Alicia Laszlo. She was walking toward a body amongst the men littering the ground, surrounded by a score of RedCorp troopers. She was approaching a rebel. A soldier aimed a kick at the body, and then another. When his wife reached them, she drew back her boot and joined in the fun.
* * *
Pain, all over. His entire body was pain, a reminder of his time in the Martian cell. Another hard, driving blow to his body brought him back to consciousness, and he opened his eyes. A woman had kicked him, and she kicked him again. The name on her suit said she was Captain Laszlo. Another man joined her, and he spoke to her in a hard voice. But his brain was fuzzy, and he lost focus. There were no further kicks. He managed to stop his brain swimming, and he opened his eyes again. Deep down, his overriding emotion was one of dark doom.
He’d failed. First, he’d failed to help the rebels win the battle. Second, he’d failed to die. There’d be no end, not yet. Just another prison, and more years of living hell, until they bored of watching him in agonizing torment and finished him. Unless…the woman soldier, Captain Laszlo was drawing a weapon, and aimed it at the area of his heart.
His hopes soared and then faded. The man who’d joined her pushed the gun away. He tried to read the name, and when it came into sharp focus, it was familiar. Hartmann. Colonel Hartmann, formerly Major Hartmann of Mars Recon II. Inside the helmet, he recognized the face of his commander from years ago. He was arguing with the Captain, and another man joined them. An older man, whose cold eyes stared down at him, cold eyes like he was examining a piece of meat on a market slab.
Cage ignored him and looked back at Hartmann, wearing the uniform of the enemy. He was arguing with the woman, and after a few seconds, he worked it out. They were arguing about killing him, he was sure. The woman sounded furious. He struggled to listen to the shouting, little more than a whisper through the thin air of Mars.
“Joshua, that man is scum; a disease to our way of life here on Mars. We’re building a paradise on this planet, and what is he trying to do? Tear it down. He has to die.”
“It’s not that simple, Alicia.” Hartmann’s voice was the same, yet different. He sounded tired. No, more than tired, dulled with strain and fatigue, “This man fought under me during the Third Martian War, and he was one of the finest soldiers I ever met. Besides, we’re not about killing people out of hand. We’re supposed to be better than that.”
She snorted. “What do you think we’re doing here? We came to kill them, not sit around a table talking to them. My father said he was a prisoner here, and he escaped. If we leave him alive, he’ll escape again. Then we’ll have to hunt him down, and this time, we may not be so lucky.”
The older man moved nearer, put his arm around the woman, and looked at Colonel Hartmann. “You should listen to your wife, son. My daughter is usually right about these things. She can sniff out trouble long before it happens. If she says kill him, you should kill him. I happen to agree with her. In fact, I thought he was already dead.”
“Director Laszlo, that’s not the way it’s going to happen. He’s a prisoner, and besides, he’s badly wounded.”
The woman knelt down and pulled aside a torn piece of biosuit. The artificial NuSkin was shredded rags. Only the remainder of the aluminum skeleton had kept him alive. A Human arm would have frozen by now, and he’d be dead. “Look, he’s a damned robot. A thing. This isn’t even a man.”
Hartmann sighed. “He’s a Lifer, you know what that is. Not a robot.”
She swung the pistol back and pointed it at Cage’s heart. “I don’t give a shit what he is. I say he dies.”
“No!” Hartmann grabbed her arm and wrenched it away, “Leave him.”
“Joshua, take your hand off my arm! I warn you, if you don’t stand aside, I’ll kill you, too. Our whole way of life is under threat, and this man stands in the way of everything we believe in. If we…”
“Director!” A panicked messenger rushed up to Laszlo, ‘Sir, we need you back at Command. You have to come now!”
He glared at him. “If they need me, they’ll have to wait. We just won a great victory here, pushed the last few rebels back to their holes, and soon we’ll be going after them to finish them off. There’s no rush, nothing that can’t wait a bit longer. We can always just starve out the last few.”
“Sir, you have to come!”
He grabbed Laszlo’s arm and tried to drag him away. The older man shook him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get off me, and tell them whatever it is has to wait!”
“It can’t wait, Director. Look!”
He pointed up to the sky, and Cage followed the direction of his gaze. They were like black clouds, high in the sky, just like they got on earth during heavy storms. He’d never seen them on Mars, not the last time he was there, not this time. They blotted out the sky, moving fast. Faster than clouds ever moved, at least, not this close to a planet’s surface.
“Sir, our sensors indicate three massive ships in low orbit. They’re launching landing ships, and indications are they’ll land inside of the next half hour.”
He squinted hard, and the clouds were dropping. Now he could make out they were ships. Not Earth ships, no way could Earth produce such behemoths. Not Martian ships, there was something strange and alien about these vast craft, dropping slowly to the surface from their mother ships. They were bigger than anything he’d ever seen detaching from another craft. He tried to envisage the massive size of a mother ship, designed to traverse huge distances, transporting a complement of military landers, and keeping their crews alive during a journey that would take years. Each landing ship was enormous, several times larger than the landers deployed from the Cyclers. They were still a long way away, perhaps fifty kilometers, but big enough to be clearly visible. Then the strange craft began to disappear behind a distant mountain range.
The messenger was still arguing with Laszlo, and the woman joined in. His erstwhile commander, Joshua Hartmann stood to one side, taking no part.
He looks like a man who’d once found a dream, and woke up to a nightmare.
A single word was uttered from every pair of lips, at first a murmur, and repeated several times. Became louder, muttered with disbelief, and then with awe. Troopers were shouting the name. The name that could inspire fear anywhere in the Solar System. A name lost in the distant past of myths and legends. Yet it was no myth, and no legend. They were here. They’d come.
Titans.
Part Three - Titan
Chapter Eleven
Tharsis Landing Ground, Mars
The black shapes dropped from the skies like a horde of avenging furies. Long tendrils of flame and smoke marked their descent as their hulls burned in the upper Martian atmosphere. Laszlo felt as if an electric probe had touched him. He snapped out orders and activated his internal comms.
“This is Laszlo. Activ
ate all planetary militias. Corporate response teams to the landing grounds. Activate Defense Protocol Alpha, now!”
He started to run and shouted to his daughter, “Alicia, finish it. Kill this bastard, and then get your people moving. We need to stop them landing. If they get a foothold on the planet, it’s over.”
Then he was gone. She raised her pistol and stared down at Cage. “So long, loser.”
Her finger tightened on the trigger, and the blast echoed across the plain. A single shot, exploding into emptiness after the shooting had died down. Alicia Laszlo collapsed in a ruined heap of smoking biosuit, her lips moving soundlessly as she gasped out her last few breaths. Hartmann lowered the gun and looked at Cage.
“I’m sorry.”
In the distance, a mass of running RedCorp troopers raced to join other units to contest the landing of the new arrivals; all thought of the rebels forgotten. Yet in that small space there were two men. Joshua Hartmann and Noah Cage. Once they’d been comrades, fellow officers on the same side. They’d became enemies, and now?
He stared back at the Colonel. “She was your wife, yet you killed her?”
“Yes, but hardly my wife. That changed a long time ago.” The voice was a throaty murmur, as if that single word was difficult to say. And was enough. Almost.
“Why?”
“Because I owe you, Cage. I owe all of our people. It was all my fault.”
Cage struggled to lift his head.
“What was your fault?”
“The missiles that took out your unit. I was responsible. It was me.” Cage stared at him as he went on, “The order came down to launch, and I just passed it on. I could have stopped it, but I didn’t.”
“But why?”
“You were getting too close to the Martian Janissary program. The entrance to the facility was just over the next ridge. You know about the Janissaries, an army of super soldiers like you.” He gave him an apologetic grin, “Well, maybe not like you. Tougher, but…different.”
Last Life (Lifers Book 1) Page 28
