by William Cray
“It would help if I knew what we were looking for.” Martes said, looking up at Cochrane who hovered over his shoulder.
“I expect we will know it when we see it, Petty Officer.”
Cochrane rubbed his tired eyes. He had been up for a full day now and he was starting to feel the effects. He watched the image on the monitor scroll past him towards the southern outskirts of Old Meridian City, near Habitation Dome 11. They had been at this for the last three hours, marking points of interest, then superimposing a vertical cross-section on each identified location. They would then begin the process of elimination to positively identify each image, and exclude it from their list.
The anxiety of the moment unsettled Cochrane. He was used to being at the center of the crisis, able to affect its outcome in some large or small way through personal action, but this time he was relegated to waiting and watching. At his fingertips was a large array of tools, which could be used for surveillance throughout the system, but in all likelihood any sign he could detect with his sensors and probes would mean it was already to late. The lurking fast attack could link into the system and monitor the situation on the same network Cochrane used. It would watch… report, then without warning… act. By then it would be too late for him to avoid disaster.
As Martes cycled through another image, Commander Aaguyo, the base maintenance officer came up alongside Cochrane. His blue service uniform hung a little looser than his usual crisp standard and he looked tired as hell. He halted next to Cochrane, folding his arms, tucking a filament-board under his elbow.
“What’s the word Chuck?” Cochrane asked.
“Bay eleven. You know I had missed those things on the inventory. I’ve gone right past them at least four times over the last three years. How did you know they were there?” Aaguyo asked.
“That was my ship during the Vendetta.” Cochrane paused, “Seems like a long time ago.”
Aaguyo nodded. “For us both.”
“Well, I looked’em over. They’re not in bad shape. Sorry I can’t devote some people to work on them, but…”
Cochrane asked, “How long?”
Aaguyo consulted his filament-board. “Two days at a minimum. Maybe more if I can't get that damned projector off the Saratoga to work. I'm going out to Stickney in a couple of hours to look at it.”
“Good luck, and thank you for your help.”
Aaguyo looked at Cochrane. “You know they’ve only authorized fifteen of my people to come up today. My best engineer on repulsors is stuck in New Meridian. They won't let us recall him to the station.”
“I know. No one from the surface is allowed back until the operation is over. I signed the order myself,” Cochrane said. “Security.”
“What the hell is going on John?”
Cochrane hesitated, averting his friend’s gaze. “I don’t know,” Cochrane lied. He needed to contact Duran.
Cochrane thanked Captain Aaugyo again and returned to the scanner.
As the scan continued, Cochrane removed his Percom, checking the latest messaging. Duran had not contacted him in some hours and he had lost all track of him in the city below. Despite the station’s diligent search there had been no more signs of the mysterious ship in orbit around Mars. Some were beginning to doubt it had been there at all.
The law enforcement operation in Old Meridian was well underway. Cochrane contemplated using the station’s communication relays to listen in on the progress of ‘Clean Sweep’ going on below them. Duran was down in the middle of it somewhere and he had said he was in bad shape in their last communication. He could be out of the fight, and if that were so, the options were dwindling. Cochrane checked his chrono.
The sharp angular H-band spike on the imager almost scrolled past him. With an abrupt utterance from Cochrane, Martes jerked the image to a stop on the very tip of the waveform. Martes, now seeing the return, recalibrated the image through the dense haze, zooming out to get the entire H-band return that filled the view on his 3-D display.
Cochrane leaned forward examining the image, “It doesn’t look right.”
He stared at the horizontal six-pointed star shaped return that appeared to be suspended six thousand meters in the air. Martes manipulated the image of and superimposed the vertical crosshatch at the three hundred meter range. The image resolved itself, appearing to resemble a shimmering ancient martial arts throwing weapon, free floating in the air.
“What the hell?” Cochrane asked. “Clarify,” he barked.
Martes hit one button, turning off all the combined spectral overlays, leaving a digitized real-time image from the slaved high-powered camera mounted on the mobile H-Band array. The star shaped spires disappeared, leaving an unobstructed view of the structure.
“What the hell is that thing? Is that what I think it is?” Martes said as his eyes went wide.
“Can you clean that image up more?”
Martes rotated the view of the digital image. He flipped between the camera view and the H-Band return. Flicking them off and on quickly. Star, then no star.
Cochrane leaned in. “Give me a hard copy of that, Priority One-Secret designator.”
Cochrane snatched it up as soon as it loaded onto the filament sheet, then he headed out of the chamber. As he passed through the door he stopped, turning back. The young Petty Officer sat back in his chair, rubbing his eyes.
“Martes,” Cochrane said, as the Petty Officer stood and snapped to attention. “Well done.”
Cochrane made his way back to his office through the station’s corridors. The Depot didn’t have any weapons oriented on the southern poles so striking from above was out of the question, much less the proposition of firing at the very tether that anchored Phobos to Mars.
It was genius. The only way to prevent the Mind Control Device from going active was to chop off its power supply, then go down there and cut the damn things free.
The Mind Control Array was pointed towards the surface of the city, pointing down into the Hebes Chasma trench, hidden by a Tri-Lum dispersion field as Duran had feared. Nine million vulnerable souls were below its arc.
Cochrane pulled out his Percom, pushing Duran’s button as he walked, looking at the station clock.
23
Emergency Coordination Platform
Barge 1
Radiation Exclusion Zone
Habitation Dome 11
Duran looked out of the lifter windows as it slid into a hover just to the north of the barge. It hovered with a group of others, like a squadron of famished needleflys waiting to pounce on the water-bloated corpse of a pre-flare cow. The insectoid machines took their place in the natural pecking order, circling and diving onto the platform to fill their tanks or discharge their cargo. The machines in front of them spewed out gouts of thrust and swiveled their wings as they completed their task and jumped away, clearing space on the narrow pad for the next bug in the well defined order.
The New Meridian City Police lifter pilot cussed and cajoled as each circling insect in the landing order touched down and paused, for what must have been an instant too long. Duran looked at the crew’s radiation badges. They were way behind decon. Every minute they hovered, moved them further into the exposure limit. The crew nervously checked their exposure tags every few seconds.
Lifter pilots had it the worst. Each time they landed and took off, contaminated particles that sat undisturbed for maybe dozens of years, flew up and around the craft in a swirling tumult, showering the vehicle and crew with radiation. The pilots would be on a very strict schedule for decontamination for both themselves and their machines. Every instant they hovered, they exposed themselves a little more.
The crew in the back guarding him couldn’t wait to get him off their bird and on to the barge so they could jet back to the iso-pads and finally be sprayed down.
Duran watched as a radiation shielded Planetary Force lifter settled onto the pad and began unloading a stack of pallets. Duran couldn’t hear the pilot’s conversati
on with the landing control, but the pilot was animated enough to take his hands off the controls and wave it in the air in frustration.
Duran slid across the floor of the lifter as the pilot jerked the aircraft’s nose towards the barge, diving at its deck. The cops guarding him in the back grabbed hand holds as the aircraft swerved, causing the neat formation of needlefly’s to scatter briefly.
The PF lifter sitting on the pad, jumped up then dove low over the street, stirring up a plume of contaminates on its low pass that bloomed up to the barges edge some seventy feet above the street.
The lifter slammed down hard on the barge landing pad. The pilot yelled back at the crew, “Get that fucker out here.”
The door slid open and Duran was shoved out, slamming hard onto the corrugated steel plate of the deck. The full body shock restraints gripped him like a skeletal ribcage and jabbed into his side, driving the air out of his lungs. The cops in the lifter didn’t care.
As Duran tried to catch his breath through the filter mask, a P-Tek had ambled out, picking him up off the deck with its articulated arms. Two NMCPD escorts followed, sweating inside their overworked Iso-suits.
The P-Tek roughly carried him over to decon where he was stripped out of his Iso-suit and scrubbed down by a foamy concoction. Next, they dragged him to an adjacent med bay where Medical Teks were waiting to assess and treat those swept up in the raid.
The M-Tek’s appendages reached out, searching for a subdermal medical implant that all Martians had inserted under their skin. Duran didn’t have one. Undeterred, it began a rough triage, halting each time its scanners ran across an anomaly that didn’t register in its medical files, making annotations for later inspection by a human doctor. The M-Tek worked on his injuries and abrasions in sequence of severity, spending the most time on his hand, mending the structural damage through inflammation and abuse. With a shot of abrupt pain, the M-Tek set the broken bones, then fit a soft compression cast around it, swathed in bandages.
Pain shot through his hand as he tried to flex it. It hurt, but he was able to move it. Nothing was offered for the pain, but Duran would have declined anyway.
The two escorting officers never released their grips on the restraints holding Duran immobile, and they kept their very lethal assault rifles aimed his direction. He was just relieved they didn’t shove him out of the lifter from three hundred meters up after finding him with a knife in his hands and one of their own officers slashed open from ribcage to pelvis. That someone else had turned the man into a bomb didn’t seem to matter at the time and he suffered their wrath for it.
After decon and medical examination he was escorted to a holding area, already starting to fill up with dregs swept up by the operation in the Zone. Duran looked at the pitiful collection of Phelman’s Children huddled in holding cells wearing the uncomfortable and stifling radiation suits, waiting to be processed.
Minutes later the P-Tek’s returned and opened the holding cage, taking Duran by his restraints. They were condescendingly careful not to damage him when the previous crew had just beaten the shit out of him while he was restrained. He was sure the beating had been recorded, but he was also sure it would disappear with the usual bureaucratic justice. The shock restraint cage around his ribs did protect them from further abuse, but didn’t prevent some of the bastards from cracking on his broken hand with snapbacks and jolting him with the shock triggers on the restraints, to the point where the batteries had worn down. The beating didn’t make him angry; he had been beaten much worse than today, but it was all taking too much time. Despite the abuse his body had suffered, he was still capable of wreaking terrible havoc if they let him loose for an instant, but that didn’t seem to be in the cards. They were being careful with him now that he was thoroughly fucked.
Covering him with a radiation isolation bag, they conveyed him across the busy barge towards the command center, weaving between a group of police cruisers and a cluster of pyramidal stacked crates, sitting adjacent to the linked command vans. Between lifter jump offs and landings, the barge’s suspension units warbled, overwhelming the noise dampening air pillows of Habitation Dome 11’s interior roof lining.
Once Duran was escorted into the platform’s command center he was released from the full body restraint leaving him standing on his own two feet. Two guards remained behind, firmly gripping the chest cage that clasped his arms at his side. The escorts pulled their Iso-suit head covers back and took deep breaths. Both were sweating like pigs, but they kept their rifles on Duran.
As Duran waited, he watched the developing operation on the four large displays against the wall of the command center. The plan was in full swing and changing its momentum would be almost impossible at this point. They were taking the dome down, block by block, but they were playing right into the Intruder’s hands. His enemy thrived in the chaos. Anyone could see that in the remains of his murder victims.
Duran spotted Cole heading towards him, a look of barely contained hostility snarling on his face. Duran straightened himself, attempting to close the considerable gap in their respective heights, preparing himself for the onslaught of questions and accusations from the imposing Lunae-Tharsis Constabulary Commissioner. The two guards tensed as Cole stalked forward, stopping less than a foot away from Duran, looking down on him.
Cole placed his hands on his hips, “You are facing some serious charges Mister Duran. Have you been read your rights?”
Duran, responded, “I haven’t got time for this bullshit Commissioner and neither do you.”
Cole refused to be drawn in. “I wouldn’t consider impersonating a Commonwealth officer, attempted murder, assault on law-enforcement personnel, interfering with an investigation, a host of fire arms charges, and intent to commit terrorism, bullshit Mister Duran, if that is even who you are.”
Duran continued, “You have got to listen to me. Things could get out of control very quickly. You have got to stop this operation. You could be playing right into their hands.”
“Tell me about Officer Korblut.” Cole asked.
“I’m sure you’ve seen his body by now. You need to tell your fellow officers, to shoot Korblut’s partner on site if they see him, if he hasn’t already blown up some your men.”
“What did you do to him?”
“I kept him from setting himself off and killing more people in the process. He was already dead. You know that. You can’t live long with that much of your organs carved away. There are at least three, maybe four more just like him out there right now. You need to alert your people, and you need to pull back into the trench immediately.”
Cole gave a wry smile, “Sure thing Duran. Anything else we can do for you?”
“Let me go. I’ve got work to do.”
Cole shook his head in disbelief, shooting back. “Why should I listen to you? So far I’ve gotten nothing from you but lies.”
“I’m following orders.”
Cole nodded, folding his arms across his chest. “So am I Mister Duran, so am I.” He turned away and walked back towards the large displays.
Duran started to lurch forward, but a gloved hand reached from behind, grabbing his shoulder. Duran tried to turn his head but stopped when he felt the barrel of an assault rifle shoved into his ear.
Duran turned back in frustration. If he didn’t get a breakthrough with Cole in the next few moments he would need to start planning a breakout. Duran watched as Cole pulled on a headset near one of the large displays that showed a group of officers in assault gear riding inside of a military lifter. The ID code, STT-04, was inscribed along the bottom.
Edgar Morse sat in the back of the PF lifter with the ten men and women of Special Tactics Team Zero Four. The Planetary Force lifter transported them across the surface of Mars outside the domes, towards their objective, the Stratospire. The team checked their weapons and communication gear as they neared the Stratospire. The loud clacks of weapons being loaded and charged was drowned out
by the noise of the lifter’s big engines and the rush of fine sand scraping across the bulky airframe.
Called Edgy by his team, Morse watched the approaching girth of the kilometer wide base of the orbital tower facility. He activated his com switch.
“Listen up slackers. When we land, set up a perimeter. The interior of the tower is already secure. Us and another team is going to secure the main exits. We have the planetside unfortunately but we’ll be landing upwind from PD3, so watch your badges anyway.”
Each of his team members nodded as the checked their gear.
“Okay. The sooner we emplace the sensors the sooner we can link the P-Teks. Then we can move to the shelter and get out of the blow. The deployment schedule says a Territorial Guard MP unit will relieve us in about six hours.”
The lifter started to pull its hover and began to descend towards the concrete loading bay outside the tower.
“If anyone does anything foolish we’ll be here. I don't need to tell you this is a highly visible target. Recent threats have been made against he city, and this is probably the biggest target on the planet. We’ll do our jobs well and keep the tower safe, then pass responsibility when the Army arrives. This is as straightforward as it gets. Any questions?”
There were none.
The lifter settled down on its skids just inside the security fence that was less than a quarter of a mile from the tower’s entrance. A group of private security contractors stood outside in full environmental suits, taking cover behind a collection of barricades and groundcars that had been parked outside the Stratospire’s exterior entrance.
Morse jumped out of the lifter first, leading his team. Things looked under control and the security team appeared to be alert so Morse directed his team to their positions. They unloaded their equipment from the lifter as the P-Teks detached from the hull. His troops gathered their gear and headed out at a slow pace towards the guarded main entrance as the lifter jumped off the ground in a spray of reddish dust. The P-Teks followed behind.
