“Yes, sir.”
“Once communications go up, I need you to keep your ear to your box. If you hear anything, anything, you send this antiques society back to Earth. You got that? You tell them to rendezvous at Smithsonian Field.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Everyone but you. You evacuate that air base. You find out who is in that base and deliver them to Smithsonian Field.”
“Yes, sir,” the pilot said. He tried to mask his nervousness, but I heard it in his voice. Piloting this relic over a battlefield would be like flying a paper kite in a hailstorm, and he knew it. If he moved quickly enough, he might survive it.
“And Hines, broadcast in the atmosphere if the space lanes look clogged. Just make sure you deliver those people back to Earth,” I said.
In theory, the atmosphere would absorb the electricity from a small broadcast the same way it absorbed the energy from a lightning storm. The shared anomaly of two hundred ships broadcasting in a relatively tight area, however, could create all kinds of damage. Who knew what kind of a chain reaction that much energy could set off?
My pilot said, “Yes, sir.” He was an Air Force cargo pilot. He accepted his orders with the stoicism of a man who flies supplies over battlefields.
The area around the spaceport was flat and rocky with rust-colored soil, a flat plain ringed by distant mountains. From the ground, it would look like a nearly endless plain; but
from the explorer, I could see the mountain range. I could see the three sets of raised rails that ran from the spaceport to the Air Force base and the remains of a train, but we were dropping quickly, and I soon lost that bird’s-eye perspective.
We touched down.
The explorer landed delicately, like it was made of tissue paper and glass.
As I had suspected, the enemy had tracked our descent. When I opened my commandLink, and yelled, “Hit the tar! Now! Now! Now!” I reached all three thousand of my Marines.
They had expected us to fly to the Air Force base, which was the logical move, to retrieve Tasman and Watson. But we had chosen a more aggressive route, and the people in charge now needed to call their forces back or face us alone.
As I said before, sludging was a blade that cut both ways. They could not call their men back without opening the airwaves for me as well.
The company commanders on the other explorers heard my orders and off-loaded their Marines in record fashion.
Had guards been waiting at the spaceport doors, they could have picked us off as we disembarked; but the people running the show had not counted on my having a fleet of self-broadcasting antiques. They had sent their men to attack the Air Force base and left their base of operations unguarded.
I had never seen the spaceport from the outside, at least not from ground level. It was a civilian structure, built during an era of peace, at a time in which the Unified Authority knew no neighbors and faced no threats. Hundreds of doorways dotted the lower walls of the building, hatchways through which mechanics and luggage handlers could pass.
The architects who created this building had designed it without any defenses. Any hostiles already in place would have no fortifications as they tried to stop my Marines from capturing the building. Assuming we captured the spaceport, we would have no fortifications when Martin Riley and his security force returned.
Assuming we survived Riley and his five thousand men, we would have the same problem all over again when Second Division arrived with twenty thousand reprogrammed Marines. When my ships arrived with twice that many troops,
Tarawa would face that problem all over again. By that time, though, there would be very little left of the spaceport to defend.
Colonel Ritz orchestrated the invasion while I carried out my own personal mission.
We approached the building from the west, the side facing the Air Force base, expecting no more than token resistance. More by the book than he liked to let on, Ritz still assembled his men into fire teams and sent them in by the numbers. Grenadiers carrying flash grenades and low-yield pills opened hatches, automatic riflemen took point position, riflemen and team leaders followed.
When push comes to shove, the Marines fall back on the same strategy almost every time—the main force attacks the enemy straight on and pins him down while a secondary force flanks and destroys. It’s a strategy that has worked for a thousand years.
The outer hatches led into air locks, thirty-foot-long atmospheric antechambers in which Mars’s native carbon dioxide was pumped out and replaced with oxygen.
I entered an air lock with one of Ritz’s fire teams. It was a long, dark tube with circular walls and a floor wide enough for an automobile or one of those trailer-pulling buggies the spaceport used for hauling luggage.
A few recessed lights shone down from the low ceiling, air poured in through vents along the top, forcing a convection that expelled the indigenous carbon dioxide through openings along the base. It was a quick process, lasting less time than it took us to cross from the outer hatch to the door leading into the building.
The automatic inner doors opened, revealing an empty maintenance floor.
“General, we are leaving for the Mars base.” It was Hines, my pilot. He said, “Good luck, sir.”
I said, “Good luck, Major.”
The next person to speak was Colonel Hunter Ritz, who asked, “General, are we going to tangle with Spaceport Security?”
I said, “I expect so, Colonel.”
I’d known Ritz a while, and he’d never struck me as the most well-informed officer. Now, all of a sudden, he spouted all kinds of data. He said, “There are five thousand of them and three thousand of us, wouldn’t it be easier to let them through the outer hatches and shoot them as they file through the door?”
Neutralize their numerical advantage by creating a bottleneck, good thought.
I said, “We need to keep the damage to the building at a minimum. We’re here to protect a civilian population.”
Ritz asked, “Do you have an ETA on Second Division?”
“They’re already up there, but they won’t launch with the
Churchill
harassing them,” I said. “Admiral Cutter’s got his hands full dealing with the
de Gaulle
and two U.A. battleships.”
“U.A. ships? The Unifieds are in this?”
“What’s left of them,” I said.
I could imagine Ritz nodding and bracing himself for the fight, as he said, “We’ll keep the specking trash outside as long as we can.”
I said, “Do what you have to do. Semper fi, Marine.”
This was my day for taking risks.
The last time I had visited Mars Spaceport, I steered fifteen hundred men into the grand arcade and started a riot. Of the 3,104 Marines I brought on this mission, I left 3,004, including Ritz, to guard the doors while I took a hundred men into the spaceport’s more populated areas.
The lay of the land was straightforward: one large continuous baggage area along the outer walls filled with conveyor belts and walkways. We crossed the gloomy empty space and passed through a doorway that opened to an inner hallway. As we entered this hall, I repeated the all-important directive, “Do not remove your combat armor. If you need to shit, shit in your armor. I will personally shoot any man I see removing his helmet. Do I make myself clear?”
I did not bother telling them why they could not remove their helmets. They did not need to hear sketchy information and paranoid theories about reprogramming. Once the fighting started, they would have plenty to worry about.
The cargo area was not used as a living space for one obvious reason—it opened to an outer world. If a single seal failed, the area would fill with toxic Martian air.
As we marched through the service halls, however, we came upon civilization. Mars Spaceport was just as I had left it: overcrowded, grimy, lacking hope. Picnickers lined the unadorned walls of the corridor. They watched us and hardly responded. Some people stared. A few kids pointed at us.
“Move out,” I told my men, and I led the way. Most generals avoid the battlefield. Those who do, seldom take point. If I had my way, I would trade my general’s stars in for the stripes of an enlisted man; the problem was that I did not trust in the abilities of the men who might replace me as commanding officers.
A spaceport map showed in a corner of my visor. We were close to our destination as the crow would fly, if that crow could fly through walls. We were below the outer gates of the Perseus wing of the complex. We needed to climb two flights of stairs to reach what had once been the general boarding level, then we needed to wind our way to the hub of the spaceport and descend into its bowels.
If we could have walked through walls, we would have had a few hundred yards to go. Observing the laws of physics and not destroying the walls around us, we had a half mile to cross.
I kept my men marching at a fast pace. We ignored locals as we sped past them. Easy to do; most people leaped out of our way, some ran.
The area was not brightly lit, but that mattered very little. We could see more than a hundred feet ahead of us in the ambient lighting, and our visors would automatically switch to night-for-day vision in the dark areas.
“Sir, I don’t get it,” Colonel Ritz said over the interLink. That was Ritz. Starting out by asking for permission to speak would have been too much like following protocol for the son of a bitch. He’d managed the “sir” part, then launched right into his conversation.
He asked, “You say we came to protect the New Olympians?”
“Affirmative,” I said.
The corridor curved ahead. The stairs to the next level would be visible once we turned that corner.
“Last time you came, you massacred a few thousand of them.” When I did not respond, he said, “You killed off their army, and now you’re back to protect them?”
“Affirmative,” I said.
“So, they were the enemy last time, and this time it’s the Unified Authority?”
“Renegade leaders from the Unified Authority, Colonel. The Unified Authority no longer exists.”
“And you say they are here to kill the New Olympians?”
“Affirmative.”
“I don’t get it, sir. What would holdovers from the Unified Authority have against New Olympians?”
“They don’t have anything against the New Olympians. They’re after us.”
A long, silent pause…something I seldom got from Ritz. Finally, “Just to make sure I have this straight, sir, a mysterious group of Unifieds who have nothing against the New Olympians is going to kill them to make trouble for us.”
“That just about sums it up,” I said.
“Why would they attack the New Olympians, sir? Why not attack us?”
I said, “We would be a military target. They’d need an army to hit us. The New Olympians are an unarmed population occupying an unprotected facility.” Yeah, I was using military-speak. I was speaking in the language that Ritz both understood and avoided.
“Ritz, you are going to have to trust me on this one,” I said.
“If you say so, sir,” said Ritz.
The hall was dark and packed with people, some standing in the center and some sitting along the walls. I could see the stairs in the distance.
A muzzle flared in the distance, above the crowd. An assassin with a lowly M27 waited for us on the stairs. I did not see the man, just the flash from his gun.
A sniper with a precision rifle and an excellent scope might not have hit innocent bystanders. This asshole sprayed into the crowd and hit nothing but innocents. A man screamed in pain. A moment later, a woman began screaming about her child. The panic began. People ran for their lives. A flood of people stampeded toward me and my men.
Some of the people running along the walls tripped and were trampled. No more aware of me than he was of the oxygen in his lungs, a man dashed in my direction. As he came in range, I hit him across the jaw with the grip of my M27, and he crumpled. I heard more firing and stepped back behind a wall for cover.
The people giving the orders for the enemy were in the spaceport, trapped. Freeman must have done something to disrupt their plans. Maybe Freeman had liberated Howard Tasman, maybe he had taken something or someone else.
“General, you’re saying that these Unifieds want to hurt us
by killing Martians?” Ritz asked. He did not hear the gunfire. He did not know that the fighting had already begun.
I said, “Shove off, Ritz. I’m busy at the moment.” Then, on an open frequency that every man would hear, I said, “We have hostiles in the spaceport.”
The assassin continued to shoot, brief bursts fired into the tail end of the scattering crowd. People screamed, and, in another minute, the junction was empty except for the wounded, the dead, and the sniper. He fired one last burst into the empty hall, but my men and I were safe behind a wall. I waited a few seconds. By the time I swung around the corner, the bastard had already run away.
Using my commandLink, I listened to the chatter of the Marines I had brought with me. One man said, “I wish I had a grenade.” Another said, “Speck! It’s so specking crowded. There’s no way we can shoot back.”
One Marine said, “It’s not the shooting that scares me. I don’t want to get trampled.” Someone answered, “You’re wearing combat armor, dumb ass. Half the specking planet can walk across your back, and you won’t feel a thing.”
“Armor isn’t bulletproof,” the first guy said.
The second guy said, “So don’t get shot.”
I waited for our gunman to return. He never did. While I waited, I checked back with Ritz.
“Any sign of hostiles at your doors?” I asked. His men had placed sensors that would warn them when anyone came within two hundred yards of the perimeter.
“No takers yet, sir. Why would the Unifieds want to kill Martians, when the Martians don’t like us?”
I said, “This is just guesswork, okay?”
“Yeah.”
I started toward the stairs, knowing that the man with the gun would not be there. He didn’t want to fight; he wanted to slow us down. At that moment, we had a huge numerical advantage; but in another few minutes, Riley’s security troops would return, and the scales would turn against us.