“I’ll go up in the Lancer,” he insists. “I’ve done three hard dances with these fuckers. And I’m one of the five people—yes, including you—that are checked out on the Star Trekky weapons systems. I can handle it. You need to be here, running the big picture. Even if it is less fun. You’re Base Commander. I’m Force Commander. Let me do my job. Unless you don’t think I’m fit?”
Shit. Stubborn bastard’s playing his Secret Cancer Card (or maybe he just wants to see if I know). And worse: he’s right on all counts, even if he is just trying to squeeze in one last good fight before he’s benched by Halley (and probably for good).
I feel like hitting something. I don’t want the chair that keeps me out of the fight, hiding in a bunker. Especially not now. But I know that makes me a selfish fuck and a bad leader and Matthew can handle it, probably better than I can. So I stuff my reflexive rage, choke it down, nod my head. Do my job and let him do his.
“Matthew,” I catch him before he’s out the hatch. I’m thinking about telling him what I’ve got in my pocket, what Paul gave me. But it’s not a good time. (And it won’t change what we have to do right now.) “Don’t wreck my pretty ship.”
“I love you, too,” he purrs at me, then takes off at a jog. Like he’s a young man.
I look at the screens. There are six blips—there have never been that many at a time, except when they hit us in space. When they destroyed everything.
Two minutes out.
Just before they come into battery range, they break formation. They still know the reach of our guns.
Their movements go impossibly random. They dart and zig and spin like a swarm of mosquitoes. I still don’t have a clear visual, but I know how they move. Nothing else moves like that.
The Lancer is just getting up on deck when the ETE ship suddenly lifts and moves to try to get in the Discs’ way. The sun is setting, so the eastern sky is going violet. That makes the gunflashes from the drones’ turrets blaze bright. And I can see the ETE shields spark and glow as they stop the rounds that try to shoot them down.
“Lieutenant Smith, I hope you know how to make the nose gun work,” I hear Matthew crack over the Link as the Lancer spins up engines.
“Never had the opportunity, sir,” Smith returns, not really joking. “Not wise to pop an EMP close to any other systems you need.”
“I’m going to assume whoever built this thing was smart enough to make sure its EM weapon doesn’t take the ship down with it,” Matthew cuts back.
Out in the eastern sky, two of the Discs stay and keep trying to take down the ETE ship—I see the bursts of their grenades on the shields—while the other four spread out to hit us from all sides.
“Get us in the air, Captain,” Matthew orders, his voice urgent. “Fly like you mean it. Best to be a moving target.”
The Lancer gets up just as the base batteries start spitting rounds at the sky. The turrets are fast, but not fast enough. The Discs begin to zig-zag. Their small guns pop a few rounds at us—not at the batteries, but at the plexi ports of the bunkers. Two rounds blossom the plexi of the Command Tower right in front of me.
“Blast shields!” I order, but MAI is already slamming the shutters. Now I can’t see, except through camera feed. It shouldn’t make a difference—MAI’s eyes are better than mine—but I feel that much more removed from the fight.
Perimeter cams give me the best shot of the ETE ship. The two Discs buzz it, trying to find a weakness to exploit. The shields hold. But if the ETE are trying to hit back, they’re having equally poor luck.
“Paul, where are you?” I call out on the ETE Link.
“On my ship, Colonel,” he calls back, sounding like he’s trying to keep his calm. “Good to have you back.”
“Having fun yet?”
“These buggers are hard to hit. Any advice?”
“I’d suggest going out and hitting by hand, but I think they’ll figure how to stay out of reach quick enough.”
“Maybe not quick enough to cost them,” Paul decides.
“They’re smart buggers,” I warn him.
“So are we.”
I hear Matthew shout as Smith jerks the Lancer to avoid a spray of Disc fire. He tries getting the turrets on, but misses three attempts. The Discs don’t: rounds ping the hull, aiming for the engines and cockpit. The Lancer is by far our fastest and most maneuverable ship, but it lacks the armor of a combat ASV.
Smith says they’re still okay, hits the engines hard to get some space. When one of the Discs flies hard after him, he pulls and old trick: suddenly breaking and then burning and fanning his tail, catching the Disc in his exhaust. The Disc loses control, flipping off into the air like it’s been flung, and Matthew tags it with one of the aft turrets. I see it getting ripped into on the targeting cameras, then it blows itself apart.
“One down,” Matthew announces without much celebration. Smith banks and burns to keep the second Disc on them from getting a decent lock—this one is too smart to get right behind them, and it keeps darting side-to-side to keep from giving them a shot. Bullets chew at the Lancer’s wings.
“Use the anti-personnel guns,” I order. “Get them breathing room.”
Kastl spins up the small batteries on the eastern perimeter, pushes them for enough elevation to barely get a shot. I know he’s done this by hand before, and sometimes a human operator can do better with instinct than MAI can do with tracking and algorithms. (I’m thinking again about the ETE theories: if the Discs are more advanced than any other tech we have, it makes sense whatever AI runs them is faster than MAI.)
Kastl starts spraying the sky, leading the Disc, then putting rounds in the air in the opposite direction, hoping to catch it if it reverses. It does, but he misses. He tries it again. This time the Disc goes up instead of back. He tries it a third time, and this time clips the thing when the Disc darts downward.
“Got you, you bastard…” I hear him hiss. But the Disc is still flying. At least he got it off the Lancer. Then his connection with the battery goes dead. Another Disc came in and hit it with grenades. “Shit!”
“I’ve got the nose gun charged,” Smith reports. “Displays say I’ve got some spread options. I could hit them wide…”
“You could burn out the base batteries,” Matthew warns. “And the sentry eyes.”
Grenades pelt Main Battery Two, attaching and then bursting their shaped-charges into the works of the turrets. Metzger’s taken control of a set of the smaller AP guns herself, and manages to tag one of the Discs during its grenade pass—the one time a Disc isn’t flying wild is when it’s locked for accurate fire. I watch the Disc burst and flip like a coin and go down hard into a hillside a few hundred meters outside the perimeter. An explosion follows seconds later, letting me know the Disc is finished. But so is Main Battery Two.
Another Disc slips in and plants charges right on the blast shields covering the west ports of the AirCom tower. I see Metzger and her tech crew get rattled a bit when they go off, but the shields hold. Then a chunk of plexi blows in at me as the Disc tries to breach the Command Tower ports. They apparently remember the layout of this base.
“I’ve got an idea,” Smith is saying. The Lancer’s engines flare and it burns hard for the base, charging the Disc that’s picking at our defenses. He’s still got the one Disc on his tail, but when Matthew opens up on the second Disc, it turns and joins the attack on the Lancer—the Discs will usually address the biggest threat first.
Smith flees into the desert, then brakes and turns on them, Matthew still spraying with the small turrets. The Discs burn hard and fly past him, getting behind him again, which puts them further out into the desert. Smith spins the hovering Lancer in place and then hits the EMP when he’s pointed away from the base.
There isn’t much to see—the pulse itself isn’t visible. But one of the Discs starts to wobble and then tumble, flies past the Lancer without firing, and hits the perimeter wall hard. The other one is wobbly, but manages to keep airborne,
and makes a run from the Lancer back toward the base. It isn’t shooting—the weapons may be knocked out or empty. MAI estimates a vector right at our Command Tower—Disc drones often kamikaze when they’re too damaged to keep shooting. The Lancer spins in hot pursuit, but the Disc is faster.
“Get out of there!” Matthew is shouting. “Clear the Com Tower!”
But then the Disc suddenly reverses direction and takes a direct run at the Lancer, guns blazing. It was just playing lame. Rounds cut up the hull, but Smith shouts out that he’s good, and Matthew keeps blasting away with whatever’s left in the turrets. The Disc finally seems to run out of ammo and hesitates just for a fraction, just enough for Matthew to tag it, and it blows in midair, not a dozen yards from colliding with the aircraft. But less than a second later, two charges blow on the Lancer’s hull, on the port side of the cockpit.
Alarms go off, and I can’t raise Smith or Matthew. The smoking ship is spinning down drunkenly on VTOL jets, trying to land, so someone is still in control of it. I watch the sleek aircraft go scraping into the rusty desert without landing gear, its jets kicking up a storm of dust. Repeated hails don’t get any answer. The violence of the billowing dust cloud ebbs enough to let me know the engines have spun down.
I’ve forgotten about the ETE.
They moved their ship closer to the base to try to back us up, still dealing with the two remaining Discs. I zoom in enough to see two sealsuits standing on top of the ship’s hull, trying to tag the Discs with their Rods. They’re not having much luck. I realize a Disc attack is something we never addressed in their training.
The Discs are conserving ammo, though—recognizing the threat but realizing they can’t do much about the ETE shields. They pop a few rounds or a grenade at the ship every few seconds just to make sure the shields are still strong. I expect they’re calculating a strategy even while they buzz the thing. Then I see one of the suits flinch and almost lose his balance when a grenade burst manages to send enough of a shockwave through the ship’s shield, and that’s what the Discs were looking for.
I don’t even have time to send a warning. One Disc flies straight at them and detonates itself just as it hits the shield. I see the ship jerk and tip and the sealsuits tumble off of it, falling a good hundred feet to the sand, just beyond our landing pads. The last Disc takes a run at them before they can recover, and sprays them with its guns. I see them both go down, their blue suits torn and bloodied. The ETE ship tries to move over them to give them cover—the Disc pops at it one more time just to confirm it can’t break the aircraft’s defenses—and the Disc switches targets. It flies straight at the Command Tower.
I see it jerk and destabilize. It looks like a large bite has been taken out of it. I look back and see one of the sealsuits on the ground getting up on his elbows and firing at it prone with his Rod. He collapses just as he scores the hit. But the Disc isn’t done yet.
“Clear the Tower!” I order. “Everybody out! Move!!”
I’ve got Kastl and two techs and me. Kastl is reluctant to give up his guns, and I have to grab him and drag him, shove him for the exit. More grenades are slamming the port shields. They’re on the verge of failure, deforming badly. Kastl has made it to the hatch when the explosions stop, and on the screen I can see the Disc spin out on a long, wobbly arc. Out of bullets. It burns hard and comes in for its last run, a dying missile aimed at the failing blast shields right in front of me. I shove Kastl through the lock, throw myself on top of him. I know I can’t get the hatch shut behind us in time.
But the Disc doesn’t hit.
I look back at the screens. MAI is tracking it. It’s burning straight up into the sky, falling apart in pieces, with something else clinging to it.
A blue sealsuit. It’s folded over the rim of the Disc like the Disc hit it head on. I can see a hand with a Rod working, chopping the Disc apart as it flies.
And then the Disc explodes in midair.
I stay put just long enough for MAI to replay the last several seconds of feed before the last Disc went boom. I see a blue sealsuit throw itself right in the path of the Disc just before it hit the Command Tower. The Disc slams the ETE hard, maybe hard enough to break every bone in even an enhanced body—I’m surprised whoever it was wasn’t just cut in half—but the Disc gets knocked violently skyward, missing its intended target. But finding another one. It sacrifices itself to take the ETE with it.
“Paul!” I’m shouting as I head for the nearest lock—an emergency hatch that exits the Command Tower right out onto the topside of the bunkers—barely remembering to grab a mask as I cycle out. I don’t get an answer on the ETE channel.
Rios has H-A suits piling out of the main locks, moving to secure and assess. Battery Two is a smoking mess. Battery One looks like it took glancing damage. The Com and AirCom towers have been pounded close to breaching, as has the main vehicle bay hatch.
Looking west, I can see the dust cloud of the Lancer’s hard landing starting to dissipate, but I can’t see the ship.
“Metzger! Anything on radar?” I demand.
“Nothing else incoming,” she answers me, sounding winded, but answers my next question: “No answer from the Lancer.”
I can’t help but scan the base perimeter, the bunker roofs, looking for whatever may be left of the suit that grabbed the last Disc. I’d be grateful that I don’t find what I’m looking for, but I have to know. The ETE ship has landed, and they’re seeing to their one wounded man on the ground—the other one that fell from the ship must have been the one that threw himself at the Disc.
“Colonel Ram…” I finally hear Paul’s voice. He coughs, sounds like he’s drowning in his own fluids. I see the shredded suit on the ground manage to wave at me, confirming.
“Simon?” I ask before he can tell me. I don’t get an answer immediately.
“I don’t know…” he answers like he does.
Thomasen is getting a rover up, but I don’t wait for him.
Running on Mars becomes skipping in the low gravity and loose rubble. It isn’t at all dignified or easy. And I can feel how my joints have aged with every jolt.
The Lancer sits in a ditch almost a klick away from the west perimeter “gate.” It’s buried itself half in sand with what its engines blew up. Its smooth hull—at least what I can see of it—is pocked and dented and big holes are blown through it where the cockpit should be.
Rios and his troopers are coming up behind me as fast as their heavy armor will allow. I get to the port forward hatch, but it’s damaged and half buried and won’t open. The starboard hatch is almost completely buried. I’m considering how I’m going to climb up a smooth round hull when the top hatch goes bang and pops off into the air, its emergency release explosive bolts blown. I scramble onto the wing to get myself up there as best I can. Fail. I have to run back to the tail and get up that way. By the time I do, the H-A suits are using their rappeller gear to grab the hatchway and haul themselves up.
Smoke is coming out of the open hatch, but not enough to say the ship is burning. I see a pilot suit try to climb out. Armored hands reach to help him. It’s Smith. He sits atop the hull and pries his helmet off, tosses it away like it’s hurting him, defaults to a soft mask. He’s bleeding from the nose and ears, seems to be having trouble seeing. His suit looks intact, but then the nearest H-A is checking his left arm and thigh. Smith winces when his side gets prodded. Then he doubles over and throws up. At least it isn’t blood, but he’s having a lot of trouble breathing and looks beyond-disoriented. The troopers hold him, tell him to take it easy, not to talk. But then he looks up and sees me and his eyes tell me he doesn’t want me here and he shakes his head, goes far away.
“Check Colonel Burke!” Rios orders, and two H-A suits drop through the hatch. I see their lights dance inside the dark ship. I go to join them. “Sir, don’t…”
But I jump down inside the lock anyway.
The smooth, perfect panels that line the cockpit are all dark, but sunlight is leaking
in through a handful of holes, lancing thin and no-so-thin rods of light through the smoke. The panels on the left side are shattered, burned. One of the control chairs is bent sideways on its mount. One of the H-A suits gets in my way, puts up a gloved hand to stop me.
“Sir…”
I push past him.
Matthew wasn’t wearing a helmet. Not that it would have made much difference.
I feel like I’m not here. Like I’m watching this from somewhere far away. I feel like an empty shell. Empty. Hollow statue. If I fell over I’d shatter.
I realize I’ve still got the vial Paul gave me in my pocket.
My fingers close around it. And I can move again.
And I know I’m doing something illegal, something he wouldn’t want, and worse: something I know is futile but I have to try. I can’t just let this be. I have to try.
“Get away from him!” I hiss at the troopers, and they don’t hesitate. They shuffle back to the airlock without argument, without a word. Let them think I need some time with my dead friend, when what I’m really doing is something either hopeless or monstrous. Because he can’t be dead. I won’t let him be dead.
I pop the cap off the vial. My hands are shaking badly—I have to hold on tight so I don’t drop it to the deck.
Then the worst part: I have to touch him.
Bastard, coward, I leave my gloves on. I try not to look, but I have to find someplace to make the injection. His neck.
His head flops to the side easy—too easy—and I’m getting his blood all over me. Slick. So much of it. And not just blood. I don’t look at him.
I can’t see anyway. I have to shake my head to clear the tears because I can’t wipe them away because my gloves are covered in his blood.
I realize I’m starting to feel sick. I shouldn’t feel sick. I’ve personally killed hundreds of people—at least hundreds—intimately enough to have their blood and worse on me. All over me.
I remind myself to get angry. Anger fixes everything. My anger fixes everything.
The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds Page 16
