Semper Mars: Book One of the Heritage Trilogy

by Ian Douglas

  At least, not the way Garroway was risking his.

  “Hang on out there!” The engine kicked them with a hard burst, and Knox grabbed a stanchion to keep from being flung against his harness. Elliott was bringing the lobber down now, balancing against the steady thrust of the NIMF’s nuclear plasma engine. Ostrowsky, working just inside the cargo bay, picked up one of the large, plastic parts-transport containers—about the size and shape of a picnic ice chest, complete with handles and hinged lid—and dragged it over to a spot on the deck just inside the hatch. They waited, then, watching Elliott’s final approach with something more than a merely academic interest.

  “I’m getting waveoffs and warnings from the base command center,” Elliott’s voice said over the intercom. “I told ’em we’re a scientific explorer team returning from Utopia Planitia, but I don’t think they believe me.”

  The story about a science team had been concocted as a means of buying time. Bergerac couldn’t be sure he had up-to-date information on all of the research teams on Mars, and it was at least plausible that one, overlooked, had been camping out on the other side of the planet since before the UN troops had even arrived.

  Before long, though, he would either use the base computer logs to verify that no such research team existed…or he would decide he couldn’t take the chance and order his people to open fire.

  It wouldn’t be much longer now, one way or the other.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TUESDAY, 19 JUNE: 1706 HOURS GMT

  Garroway

  Cydonia One ground position

  One kilometer south of Cydonia

  Prime

  Sol 5658: 1421 hours MMT

  “Down!” Caswell cried, throwing herself facedown into the sand. “We’re taking fire!”

  Garroway ducked instinctively, then rushed ahead, dropping to his belly behind the low ridge of hard-packed sand a few meters to Caswell’s right. He couldn’t hear shots, not in this thin air, but he could see dark shapes scurrying along another ridgeline a couple of hundred meters to the north. Beyond, just visible on the horizon, he could see the tops of several habs, the microwave tower, and the obelisk of the shuttle Ramblin’ Wreck standing on its apron. A blue UN flag hung listlessly from a pole.

  Sand splashed from the crest of the ridge less than a meter away, and he slid farther back behind the dune’s protective rise. Several of the other Marines returned fire, but Jacob and the other noncoms yelled at them to drop.

  Lieutenant King dropped to the ground next to him. “Here we go,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Garroway replied. “Now we start praying for air support.”

  1709 HOURS GMT

  Cydonia Two aboard MSL

  Harper’s Bizarre

  30 meters above UN Positions

  South of Cydonia Prime

  1424 hours MMT

  Knox took another look out the cargo hatch. They were less than one hundred feet up now, close enough to see individual blue-helmeted troops scurrying about on the ground or ducking for shelter behind the three Mars cats parked near the base’s main hab. He saw a flash as someone took a shot at them and something jarred the lobber’s hull…then again.

  Fortunately, the lobber’s appearance had rattled the base defenders, and their fire was less than accurate. Some of the blue-helmets ran for cover. Others stood in the open, rifles dangling at their sides, as they stared up at the huge, four-legged apparition that was bearing down on them from this unexpected direction. The jet of plasma from the lobber’s engine was invisible, but the heat waves shimmering beneath warned of high temperatures and a possible radiation hazard. Some of the defending troops hesitated before firing, fearful perhaps that they would bring the thing down on top of them.

  “Okay, Captain Elliott,” Knox said, leaning out from the cargo bay as far as he could so that he could see. “Let’s take that near Mars cat, the one with hull number 357.” There were five blue-helmeted troops huddled together in the shadow of the crawler.

  “That’s number 357, rog,” Elliott replied. With a thump, the lobber changed course slightly, drifting toward the target. Knox reached down and picked up his end of the ice chest, and Ostrowsky, opposite, did the same. Carefully as the lobber bounced and jolted, he unsealed the pressure-tight lid with a sharp hiss and opened it. A simple latch arrangement kept the lid locked open, back and out of the way.

  Inside, set in loosely packed array, were thirty cans of Stony Brook beer.

  They were fifty feet above the Mars cat now and perhaps fifty feet to the side, drifting along, Knox estimated, at a man’s walking pace. “Ready?” he asked.

  “Ready, Gunny,” Ostrowsky replied.

  “And…three, and…two, and…one…”

  With each number, they swung the chest out, then back, working up the rhythm and the momentum.

  “…and…now!”

  “Bombs away!” Ostrowsky yelled. They released the ice chest on the up-and-out swing, tossing it clear of the drifting lobber. Its lid latched open, it sailed through the air, turning end over end and scattering a cloud of small, metallic cylinders that glittered and flashed in the afternoon sun.

  The cans fell, spinning, and long before the first one reached the ground, some of them had already exploded in a glorious, golden spray that sparkled as it fell….

  1709 HOURS GMT

  UN Positions

  South of Cydonia Prime

  1424 hours MMT

  Lieutenant Jean-Michel Dutetre was aiming his FA-29 rifle at the splay-legged apparition backlit against the sky overhead when the case sailed out into the air, spilling its contents across the UN position. His first thought was that it was some kind of cluster bomb, a projectile designed to scatter a cloud of smaller bomblets, even though UN intelligence had reported that the US Marines on Mars possessed no such specialized munitions.

  His thought was confirmed an instant later when some of the falling cylinders struck one another or simply exploded; a rain of gold liquid splattered down across the sand, the Mars cat, and the men crouched behind it. Each drop that touched the ground seemed to explode in a puff of white gas and ocher dust. At the same time, whole cylinders were hitting the ground with distinct, hollow-sounding pops, exploding and hurling streamers of liquid and white gas in every direction.

  The empty case struck the top of the Mars cat’s cab, bounced off, and landed on the sand a few meters away. Several UN troops went to their knees, scrabbling desperately at the liquid that clung to their helmet visors like hot-smoking glue.

  One can struck Private Benz squarely on his blue helmet; the liquid splattered across his armor and Dutetre’s armor as well, and when it hit, it clung and smoked, steaming furiously like some kind of unimaginably powerful acid….

  Dutetre dropped his rifle and began trying to brush the liquid off. It was boiling and freezing at the same time, the liquid bubbling furiously and giving off clouds of white smoke even as it congealed to a thick, icy frost that clung to whatever it touched. He couldn’t imagine what the stuff might be…but he was terrified that whatever it was must be eating its way through his armor.

  “Chemical attack!” Dutetre screamed over the general command frequency. “Chemical attack!”

  “It’s acid!” someone else yelled. “It’s eating my suit!”

  “Help me! It’s all over my visor! I can’t see! I can’t see!”

  1711 HOURS GMT

  Cydonia Two aboard MSL

  Harper’s Bizarre

  30 meters above UN Positions

  South of Cydonia Prime

  1426 hours (MMT)

  “…and two, and…one, and…now!”

  Together, Knox and Ostrowsky hurled another case of Stony Brook from the shuttle’s cargo bay, nailing the third and final Mars cat, engulfing the vehicle in swirling steam.

  They’d tested the idea back at Mars Prime before loading the beer aboard the lobbers for the voyage north. The beer cans were actually fairly stable in the Martian near vacuum, though they were
under high pressure. The pressure increased rapidly as the beer cooled enough for the water content to start to freeze, expanding against the confines of the thin aluminum walls of the can.

  All of this meant that any sharp, hard shock—such as striking another can in flight, or smashing into the ground or the cab of a Mars cat or the top of a blue-painted space helmet—guaranteed an explosive release of pent-up pressure, and the moment beer hit the Martian atmosphere, several things happened all at once. The carbon dioxide in suspension in the liquid came out of suspension very quickly, as foaming bubbles, and as gas that turned as visible and as white as smoke as it chilled. The liquid froze almost as soon as it touched the cold outer layers of armor or vehicle windscreen; everything it touched was swiftly coated by a thin scum of water ice and sublimating carbon dioxide.

  And where the liquid touched the Martian ground, the effect was even more spectacular. Most of the surface regolith was so dry it made the sands of the Sahara Desert seem like wetlands in comparison. When liquid water hit it, as the Viking landers had demonstrated decades before, it released a large amount of oxygen…enough to create a sharp fizz and enough of a pop to fling a cloud of fine, dry dust into the air. Enough liquid hitting the ground all at once created the impression, if not the fact, of an explosion….

  Garroway had first considered tossing the beer cans individually, like hand grenades, but he’d rapidly discarded that idea. One can exploded by itself made a small mess but simply wasn’t that spectacular. Besides, Marine armor was not designed for throwing hand grenades—a serious deficiency, so far as Knox was concerned. A large number of cans, however, spilled all at once from a hovering lobber across a large area, created a truly spectacular effect.

  The devastating and totally unexpected nature of the attack had thrown the defenders into complete panic. In an instant, the discipline of the UN troops had vanished, as case after case of chemical bombs was flung from the hovering cargo shuttle, scattering their contents across broad footprints of desert. Some troops stood their ground, continuing to fire up at the lander; most fled, many of them dropping their weapons as they either scattered into the desert or ran in an ungainly mob back toward Cydonia Prime.

  “What’ll it be, folks?” Elliott called down to the two bombardiers. “The trench or the UN’s HQ?”

  “The trench, Captain,” Knox replied. “We want to open a hole for the major.”

  “Hang on to your beer,” Elliott replied. “Coming around to the south now.”

  The lander’s engine flared, jolting Knox and Ostrowsky as they clung to the cargo bay’s framework.

  The trench was about a half kilometer or so away.

  1711 HOURS GMT

  Cydonia One ground position

  One kilometer south of Cydonia

  Prime

  1426 hours MMT

  More high-velocity bullets slashed into the sand dune, hurling up meter-high gouts of dust as the Marines tried to bury themselves just a little deeper in its welcome shadow. Garroway held his rifle up above his head, using its optics to transmit a magnified image of the enemy line to his helmet HUD display. He could just make out the line of the next dune on the horizon, 185.4 meters distant according to his rifle’s laser ranger, and occasional black spots that might be the heads of the enemy.

  “Pretty damned hot, Major,” Lieutenant King said, crouching in the sand next to him.

  “They’re dug in and they’re waiting for us,” Garroway replied. He brought the rifle—and his arms—back down under cover. Every Marine there was well aware that what might be a light wound on Earth would, here, almost certainly mean death as the armor’s air poured out through a bullet hole. “We can’t take them frontally.”

  “Hey, you think the beer-bombing idea’s gonna work, Major, sir?” Corporal Slidell asked. He was lying on the ground on the other side of Lieutenant King.

  “It damned well better, Slider,” Garroway replied. “If it doesn’t, we’re in a hell of a fix…and we’ll have thrown away the only beer within a hundred million miles.”

  “You can say that again,” Slidell said. “Sir.”

  King held his own rifle above the embankment for a look. “Hey, Major!” he said. “Have a peek!”

  Garroway raised his rifle again, careful not to lift it far above the dune. This time, he could see a lobber drifting through the sky just beyond the enemy lines. As he watched, a tiny object flipped out of the lobber’s side, spilling dozens of smaller objects as it fell. The reaction in the UN lines when the objects hit was immediate and spectacular. Men were leaping out from behind the low ridge, some slapping at themselves, others firing at the lobber overhead, and the rest running as fast as their cumbersome armored suits would allow.

  “You know,” King said, “I think we’ve just added a new secret weapon to the Corps’s inventory. Beer bombs!”

  “Yeah,” Slidell added. “My beer!…”

  “Sacrificed in a good cause, Slider,” Garroway said. “We were not issued ordnance sufficient to the needs of this mission. We therefore improvise, adapt, and overcome!”

  “Yeah, I guess. Look at them blue-tops run!”

  A ragged volley of gunfire snapped out from the Marine lines, tearing into the UN troops who were shooting at the lobber. Several toppled over backward, falling back into the trench. Others dropped their weapons and started to run.

  “Let’s go, Marines!” Garroway shouted. Rising, he struggled up through yielding sand to the top of the dune, then lurched over the top. A bullet struck his armor with a sharp spang; he pivoted, targeting the UN soldier who’d fired, and sent back an answering burst. The man tumbled back out of sight, dead or simply knocked down, there was no way to tell.

  Not all of the UN troops had run, and those still in place opened up with a devastating volley. Their line was broken, however, by the sudden attack by the lobber, and as the Marines charged, those in the trench wavered, then began falling back.

  One Marine to his left—Marchewka, he thought—flung up his arms and pitched back down the face of the ridge. An instant later, Corporal Hayes’s helmet exploded in fragments and pink-tinted white vapor. For seconds, the charge wavered…and then the Marines were surging forward, firing from their hips as they jogged across the sand.

  Ahead, another case was flung from the lobber, scattering cans of beer in a terrifying bombardment of steam and ice and sticky, golden liquid.

  Broken, panicking now, the UN troops were running….

  1714 HOURS GMT

  Cydonia Two aboard MSL

  Harper’s Bizarre

  50 meters above UN Positions

  South of Cydonia Prime

  1429 hours MMT

  “We’ve got about five more minutes of fuel at this rate, guys!” Elliott called over the intercom. “You’d better think about where we’re gonna set down!”

  Knox looked at the remaining cases of beer in the cargo bay. There were three left, and he hated to break off with bombs still on the racks. “Bring us around to the base, Captain,” he replied. “One more pass, and we can touch down by the Fortress.”

  “Roger that. Hold on. I have to grab some altitude.”

  The lobber’s thrust increased briefly, boosting them higher. Below, he could see at least a dozen UN soldiers, fleeing their trench line and jogging north as fast as they could, leaving several bodies and a large number of weapons lying in the sand.

  The Marines were swarming over the former enemy works now. Some of them were stopping to pick up discarded weapons; there’d not been enough to go around, of course, and some of the Marines had charged the UN works unarmed.

  They all had weapons now, however, as they continued to pursue the Foreign Legion troops toward Cydonia Prime.

  As the lobber began descending again, Knox saw a small mob clustered around the outside of the main hab’s airlock. Most of them, he thought, were UN troops caught in the earlier attack against the parked vehicles, trying to get back inside.

  The mob was an easy tar
get; a case of chemical bombs flung high over the cluster of running, armored men spilled its contents across them all. Explosions of bone-dry dust suddenly reacting to liquid water and alcohol, the sticky splash of rapidly gelling beer, the stark confusion of running men and panicked radio calls served to dissolve the last remnants of any unit cohesion the UN troops might have had.

  1715 HOURS GMT

  UN Positions

  Cydonia Prime

  1430 hours MMT

  Somebody collided with Dutetre from behind, knocking him down. Growling a harsh, Gallic curse, he rolled over and started to rise. Something caught his eye.

  He was only just beginning to realize that the projectiles launched from the cargo shuttle were not doing that much damage when they struck. The explosions were spectacular, certainly, but the shrapnel traveled so slowly it bounced off combat armor without effect. The liquid inside, for all its steaming and bubbling, didn’t seem to be doing anything except make a mess of the men’s suits…and blind the ones who got the stuff on their helmet visors. A few meters away, he saw one of the cans lying empty on the sand.