The Gods of War

by Graham Brown

  He noticed their faces were gaunt and thin, their eyes no longer held hope but anger.

  Some of them had begun to chant. “Water…water.”

  It was little more than a quiet murmur, but James had no doubt the chant would grow. Trouble was coming. If they didn’t find water soon, they’d have a rebellion on their hands.

  With that thought in mind, James turned his back on the crowd and stepped toward the men running one of the huge drilling rigs.

  The grinding noise of the drill was as monotonous as the crowd’s chanting.

  “How far down are you?”

  “Eighteen thousand feet,” the man replied.

  “Anything?”

  The driller shook his head. “The studies say it’s down there, but all I’m finding is rock.”

  “Great,” James uttered sarcastically.

  He looked up at the churning sky. The driller’s gaze followed. “Maybe the rains will come back,” the driller suggested.

  “Poisoned rain isn’t going to help these people,” James replied. “Keep drilling.”

  “How far do you want me to go?”

  “As deep as you can. In fact, drill until you run out of pipe. And then you fake it until we get more. These people find out we’ve hit a dry well, and we’re gonna have a damned riot.”

  The driller glanced nervously at the crowd and then nodded. As he went back to work, Collins hopped off the rig and strode across the dusty ground to where two of his men stood, Captain Leonardo Perrera and Lieutenant William Bryant.

  Perrera was dressed in grungy fatigues, smoking a cigarette with one hand and holding the heavy ZR-94 pulse rifle lazily in the other. He’d been with the 41st for almost as long as James.

  Bryant was new. Straight from the war collage. He was done up in full battle gear, armored up like a damn crusader: helmet on, body armor strapped tight, leg and arm protectors in place. He held his own rifle across his body and down at a forty-five degree angle as if he might need it any second. He looked nervous. “What do you think Major?”

  James gave him the once over. “I think, Bryant” he began, “that you must be insane to wear all that gear in this heat. On the other hand…you may finally end up needing it today.”

  Bryant didn’t get the joke; he was always in full armor. Perrera, on the other hand, chuckled, took another drag on the cigarette and then flicked it to the ground.

  “Any word out of the insurgent we captured?” Collins asked.

  “Nope,” Perrera said. “He was definitely Black Death.”

  Black Death. The leading terrorist group of the day. After the last war, a new type of insurgent had begun to feed on the decay. They wanted radical change, more radical than anything before. Their desired goal was the destruction of their own kind. Only with humankind gone, they reasoned, did the planet stand any chance of survival. They hoped to cause the mass starvation and worldwide pandemic the government was fighting so hard to prevent.

  “You think the Black Death care about something this small?” Collins asked.

  “Nope,” Perrera said. “I don’t. I think they know you’re here. Like it or not, you’re a target.”

  “Someone should tell them that killing me would do my father a favor. They might stop trying so hard.”

  Perrera laughed. Bryant looked on nervously, not sure if he should laugh or protest.

  “You know this wouldn’t be a problem if we had our heavy armor,” Pererra said. “We look vulnerable with just a few rigs. Any word from Lieutenant Dyson?”

  Dyson was one of the company commanders. He was supposed to be bringing in a full squadron of heavy armor. But for reasons no one had seen fit to tell them, he’d been delayed incommunicado for nearly three weeks now. Every time Collins asked he was simply told that Dyson and the big rigs were en-route.

  “Not a damn word,” James said.

  Out beyond the fence the chanting had begun to grow louder. The gaps were filling in, and James could see the crowd growing deeper all along the fence. “Armor or not, we need to back these people off the gate. Get the MRVs up here and move the rest of your men into position. We need a show of force before they do something stupid.”

  Perrera tossed the cigarette to the ground and grabbed his radio. But Bryant hesitated.

  “Problem with my order lieutenant?”

  Bryant shifted his weight. “With all due respect, Major, I’m not sure we need to threaten these people. They’re just worried. There’s a rumor going around that we’re stealing the water for ourselves. I think if we talk to them, explain what we’re doing…”

  Collins smiled. Bryant didn’t understand what they were dealing with out here in the settlements. The very people they were trying to save hated them and blamed them for everything. It didn’t take much to fire them up. And if the Black Death were swirling around, they’d be damn sure to play on that fear.

  “By all means,” Collins suggested. “You go talk to them, lieutenant. I’ll bring up the big guns just in case they don’t like what you have to say.”

  James smiled as he spoke; he figured this would be a valuable lesson for the newly minted lieutenant.

  For his part, Bryant didn’t seem to know what to make of the offer, but he hopped down off the battlement and hiked toward the main gate. As he went forward, Perrera and Collins ordered the men into position.

  With quiet efficiency, the reserves began streaming forward. While from the far side of the complex, a heavy thudding sound could be heard as three MRVs (Mechanized Robotic Vehicles) came forward.

  Like giant walking tanks, the MRVs stood three stories tall. The main cab housed three men and swiveled like a turret. Each side bristled with rotary cannons, rocket launchers and high power plasma cannons. They took up positions around the main drilling rig in a triangular formation.

  As the forces took up the defensive positions, James joined Lt. Bryant.

  “Please,” Lt. Bryant was saying. “Please listen to me. We’re trying to help you. We haven’t found water yet, but we will.”

  “Military filth!” someone shouted. “You sent us here to die.”

  Another voice shouted from a different section. “They’re taking the water for themselves. Stealing it!”

  As a clod of dirt was hurled into Bryant’s face, James sidled up next to him. “Still think you can make them love us?”

  As Bryant swept the dirt from his uniform, someone at the front of the crowd began banging a pipe against the iron gate. “Water, water!”

  The others joined in, and the chanting and banging grew louder and louder until it was echoing across the vast complex.

  It was all too perfect, James thought. Too choreographed. He began to think it was a distraction. His ignored the chanting crowd and the banging pipes and began scanning for signs of different activity.

  It didn’t take long before he spotted a group of men moving oddly, sliding through the crowd but not chanting or raising their arms and pumping their fists. They were hauling something.

  He put the radio to his mouth. “Eagle One, scan sector two immediately. Possible terrorists.”

  One of the big MRVs took a step forward and pivoted to the right.

  The men had dropped out of sight, crouched down behind the crowd. James clutched his rifle and began moving that way.

  “Guard the rig!” he said to Bryant. “Perrera, you’re with me.”

  “Where are you going?” Bryant asked.

  “We’ve got bigger problems than an angry crowd.”

  James began to run forward, but it was too late. Explosives went off behind the crowd. The startled members of the crowd realized they were in trouble. They surged forward into the gates and the electric fencing. Sparks shot across it, and screams of pain went up as a second wave of explosives went off behind them.

  “Get away from the gate!” Bryant was shouting. “Please back away!”

  At the same moment, a new threat appeared as several off road vehicles came racing over a hill trailing cloud
s of dust. They opened fire on the crowd members who were trying to flee, forcing them to turn back toward the gate.

  Even as the MRVs locked in on the speeding trucks and opened fire, another series of explosions thundered, and the crowd surged forward again.

  This time they crashed the gate in an unstoppable panic, a mass of humanity shorting out the fence, bending and breaking the heavy gate and pouring through like water from a collapsed dam.

  Hidden in that crowd would be dozens of terrorists with explosives strapped to their bodies.

  “God no!” James shouted. “Eagle One, drop the hammer!”

  He took cover in a ditch as the MRVs opened fire on the crowd. Thousands would die, but they had to protect the drilling rig, or a hundred times that many would die out in the settlements.

  The MRVs tilted their cabs toward the crowd and opened fire with their rotary cannons. Thousands of shells screamed overhead, laying waste to the stampeding crowd like a forest being cut down.

  Only now did the terrorists show their hand. From positions behind the scattering crowd, missiles came screaming forth. Two of them hit the lead MRV engulfing it in a ball of flame. A third hit upper reaches of the main drilling rig, while others hit among the men of the 41st.

  The crowd began to scatter, but several dozen terrorists continued to fight. Collins saw the MRVs swing into action and begin a quick eradication of the foes, but they were just part of the cover. He finally spotted what he feared. Three men were running directly toward the drilling platform.

  He took aim and fired, hitting the first man, who fell and then exploded in a fireball two stories high and fifty feet across. But he missed the other two, as civilians crossing in front of him took the next two shots.

  “Damn it!”

  James took off running, forcing his way through the crowd. Pushing people out of the way.

  “Get down!” he shouted, raising the rifle. He pulled the trigger winging the second terrorist, but he was too late to get the third. The man reached the drilling rig and threw a satchel into the works. An ear-shattering explosion followed. The rig was blown completely apart, the mangled metal toppling over to the sides.

  Despite being a hundred feet away, James was thrown backwards by the blast. He landed on the ground stunned and woozy.

  Seconds later someone was pulling him to his feet. It was Lt. Bryant.

  “Major? Are you alright?”

  James saw Bryant’s mouth moving but his ears were ringing and he heard nothing. He got to his feet. In one direction the mangled wreckage of the drilling rig was burning. In the other, the suicide bomber he’d winged was slowly getting to his feet.

  Without acknowledging Bryant, Collins raced toward the man, tackled him and knocked the detonator out of his hand. As the terrorist stretched for it, James hammered the man across the face with the butt of his rifle.

  “You son of a bitch!” he shouted.

  The terrorist looked up at James, his face bloody and covered with grime.

  “The end of man is near,” the man said. “Even you can’t stop it.”

  With fury burning in his heart, James raised the rifle above his head intending to smash the bastard’s skull.

  “Major!” Bryant yelled, grabbing his arm.

  A new wave of cannon fire from the MRVs burned the air above them. James looked around. The crowd was dispersing, fleeing from the onslaught. The off road vehicles were getting picked off one by one as they raced for the horizon.

  He grabbed his radio as the last of them was obliterated by a missile from Eagle Three. “Hold your fire!” he ordered. “I repeat, stand down and hold your fire!”

  Across from him, the MRVs ceased firing almost instantly. Their rotary cannons whirled to a stop, the tips glowing red from the heat and smoke pouring from the barrels. They turned from quadrant to quadrant but the crowd and the terrorists hidden among it were racing headlong into the distance.

  James looked down and ripped a black band from the terrorist’s arm.

  “Who sent you?” James demanded. “Who’s your leader?”

  The man did not reply; instead, a strange froth appeared on his lips. James grabbed the man’s throat to stop whatever poison he’d taken from being swallowed, but it was too late. Slimy, white foam began pouring from the man’s mouth as he choked and coughed and convulsed into death spasms.

  “Cyanide,” Bryant said.

  Disgusted, James released the man. He stood slowly, holding the armband.

  “Black Death?” Bryant asked.

  “Yeah,” James replied. “And they certainly weren’t after me.”

  He threw the armband down and turned. Bodies lay all around them: soldiers, civilians, terrorists. Among them Lieutenant Perrera laid awkwardly, his eyes open, his body riddled with shrapnel, his blood staining the soil beneath him.

  A look of anguish settled over James. He stared for a moment—as a medic tried to help—but it was clearly too late. Perrera was already dead.

  With a feeling of despair that he could hardly contain, James looked up at the poisoned sky and took a deep breath. Then he turned to Bryant. “Gather up our dead, Lieutenant.”

  “And the civilians? What should I do with their bodies?”

  James hesitated. They didn’t have time to bury a thousand civilians. “Burn them.”

  Bryant hesitated for a moment and then went to work. His armor was dirty now. Charred and scuffed. His soul would soon follow.

  As Bryant moved off, another group of soldiers stepped forward to re-secure the main gate if they could. A weathered sign above it read: Prairie View, Kansas, USA.

  CHAPTER 2

  Isidris Basin, Mars

  Hannah Ankaris sat in the passenger seat of a huge ten-wheeled vehicle, known as a Deca-Trac, as it trundled across the red surface of Mars. The big machine moved slowly, more like a monstrous caterpillar than an off road vehicle out on the plains.

  Thirty-one years old, with straight black hair, olive skin and green eyes, Hannah was attractive enough to most men, but more stern and standoffish than they seemed to like. She was tough, thick skinned and decisive, traits that made for a better friend than lover.

  Not that it mattered, she thought. With life a constant struggle for most, love and passion seemed little more than a selfish lie. Human existence was fairly desolate, though at least tinged with hope like the planet around her.

  After decades of work, a colony was growing on Mars. A city, named Olympia, had been built, protected by an artificial magnetic field and surrounded by a hundred square miles of green fields and cropland. But beyond the protection of Olympia’s shadow, the world was still mostly inhospitable to mankind.

  One cog in the effort to change lay to their right, where the ugly tower of an atmosphere processing unit belched clouds of black smoke and grey steam.

  The ungainly collection of rigging, steel plates and high-pressure tubing looked something like an oversized oil rig. One of nearly a thousand that dotted the planet, they were designed to burrow into the crust, extract, grind up and then melt the rocks and soil, ejecting the molten remnants in a volcanic stream, and releasing prodigious amounts of sulfur, nitrogen and oxygen in the process.

  Ugly enough to begin with, the plants quickly became encrusted with black soot and surrounded by piles of slag a hundred feet high and stretching ten city blocks in every direction. When they had exhausted a particular extraction site, the plants pulled up stakes and moved to a new spot, crawling at the break-neck pace of one mile per day before settling down and digging in once again.

  After years of effort, the atmosphere of Mars had reached a density almost half as thick as Earth’s, and the planet itself had gained a collection of long, dark scars. Seen from space, it looked as if the planet was being stitched together in some great medical experiment.

  As Hannah studied the atmospheric plant, Alvin Davis drove the big rig. He was a friend and an ally, and also a member of the tech squads that maintained everything on the colony. “How
close to you want me to get?” he asked.

  Hannah checked the coordinates she’d been given. Their goal lay well beyond the plant, but the plant would give them some cover.

  “Take us in onto the access ramp and then around the back,” she said. “From there resume our course.”

  Davis nodded and turned the Deca-Trac.

  “Once we’ve pulled in behind it,” she added, “set our status to indicate arrival and maintenance, and then switch off internal tracking. If anyone’s watching us on the board they’ll have to assume the plant is blocking our signal.”

  Davis nodded and did as ordered. “Better hope no one comes out to lend a hand.”

  Hannah doubted that would happen. No one liked to leave the Green Zone if they didn’t have to. Fewer still liked working on the modification plants.

  “If they do, I’ll come up with some excuse,” she said. “Or have them committed to the psych ward and sedated.”

  “So being the chief medical officer comes with a few perks after all,” Davis replied.

  Hannah laughed. She was in charge of three doctors, a nursing staff and two labs. Her group was kept busy by an endless string of testing, injuries and strange maladies that cropped up among the colonists. Just keeping on top of the work kept her constantly on the move. A privilege that helped with her second, covert occupation. Still, she would be hard pressed to explain what she was doing out here at an un-manned plant.

  Before long, they’d put the processing unit behind them, and rolled out onto the vast empty plains. Hannah looked to the west. Low on the horizon and ready to set, the sun was a ball of orange in the darkening sky. To the east, a second source of light beamed down on them. Hazy and scattered like headlights in fog, this source of light came from a massive collection of orbiting mirrors, called the Solaris Array.