Semper Mars(112)
“Right.” She put her helmet back on, switching on the headlamps to cast a harsh, yellow glow in the direction in which she was looking. They left Walsh with one of the Americans, while the other took Walsh’s ATAR. Close together, in single file, the three made their way through the silent, stifling space station, getting all the way to the other end before they encountered anyone. Fuentes saw a movement against a lighted window and called out, “Hold it! US Marines!”
She heard a Gallic sigh in the darkness. “I suppose it had to be. Very well, US Marines. We surrender.”
There were just two UN troops left, Colonel Cuvier and his aide, a Captain Laveau, not counting the members of the regular station crew.
It seemed like anticlimax. Fuentes’s heart was still hammering beneath her breastbone, and she was keyed up with a battle lust unlike anything she’d ever felt before in her life. As Gresham held the prisoners at gunpoint, she made her way to the control-deck radio. “Cheyenne Mountain, Cheyenne Mountain,” she called. “This is the American Space Station Freedom. The Marines have landed and have the situation well in hand.”
She’d always wanted to say that….
TWENTY-TWO
SUNDAY, 17 JUNE: 0919 HOURS GMT
Garroway
Candor Chasma
Sol 5656: 0838 hours MMT
They’d broken out of the narrow canyon that stretched across the Martian desert from Tithonium eighteen days after leaving Heinlein Station, and then, at last, the MMEF had started to move. On the desert flats beyond the canyon, they’d raced along at a relatively high speed, their drag sled raising a whirling cloud of dust behind them as they ground across endless sand flats and dunes beneath the towering expanses of red-and-tan-banded cliffs four kilometers high.
After three weeks, to say they all were tired, dirty, hungry, or thirsty would have been grievous understatement. Some of them could barely stand, so bad were the blisters and contact sores at various places on their bodies, where the armor had been rubbing almost constantly. Their destination, however, was nearly in sight.
Early in the predawn hours of the twenty-first sol of the march, they deployed from the Mars cat. Four of the Marines—Lazenby, Hayes, Petrucci, and Follet—no longer had working armor. For a time, they’d tried trading off with other Marines, but space was so cramped it was easier to simply take them off the watch list and let them enjoy the relative luxury of living in their fatigues again. Two more, Kennemore and Witek, had such bad sores on their legs and backs that Doc Casey had recommended both men be taken off duty and out of their suits.
Those six, then, plus the three civilians, all remained with the Mars cat, with Corporal Hayes at the controls, while the rest of the Marines clambered out through the airlock for one last time and trudged their footsore way across the sand, leaving the crawler behind.
Garroway and King had carefully checked the terrain ahead using the maps left aboard the crawler. Mars Prime was located two hundred kilometers from the point where the narrow, straight-line fault canyon opened into the far vaster and emptier basin known as Candor Chasma. They’d already traversed about 180 of those kilometers in just the past two days, making a brisk eight to ten kilometers per hour. They now estimated that the base was less than twenty kilometers ahead.
Twenty kilometers. About twelve miles. They could walk that far if they had to.
Once the Marines were moving ahead on foot, Hayes started up the Mars cat again and followed, but slowly, meandering along at a stately three kilometers per hour, a speed so slow that even with blisters the Marines outside could easily outpace the cat. The sled, empty of people now but still weighted down with crates and canisters, raised its signature cloud of dust as it dragged along in the crawler’s tracks. It wasn’t too long, then, before Sergeant Jacob, on point, spotted an answering cloud of dust to the east. He signaled the rest of the Marine column, which swung to the south and took cover behind a low, sandy ridge. Twenty minutes later, as the Mars cat trundled slowly past the ridge, two more Mars cats appeared out of their dust clouds, racing along at 20 kph from the direction of Mars Prime.
The Marine crawler halted, dust still hanging in a redgray pall above and behind the gently purring vehicle. The two new crawlers halted as well thirty meters away. A few moments later, airlocks opened, and blue-helmeted troopers began filing out.
0946 HOURS GMT
Kaminski
Candor Chasma
0905 hours MMT
Lance Corporal Kaminski lay on his stomach at the top of the ridge, watching through his rifle’s sighting camera with a vid-feed to his helmet’s HUD as the UNdies exited their tractors. It looked like there was a total of about fifteen UN troops, all armed. That put the Marines at a serious disadvantage; of the twenty-one Marines on the ridge, only four had ATARs, rifles taken from their former guards so long ago at Heinlein Station.