Semper Mars(114)

“Nicht schiessen! Nicht schiessen!”

“Don’t shoot! I surrender!”

The dust was settling out of the air now, the cloud thinning. The few blue-tops still standing were surrendering, dropping their weapons and raising their hands high. Ostrowsky and Knox, both according to plan, each entered a different UN cat and took the drivers prisoner. In seconds, then, the skirmish was over, the surviving UN troops disarmed and sitting on the ground.

Twenty-one US Marines, with a little help from the decoy Mars cat, had killed nine UN-service Foreign Legion troops and captured eight, at a cost of one man wounded.

It was, Garroway thought, a fitting end to an epic march that ought to be remembered right there alongside the Corps’s saga of O’Bannon and the Marines at Derna.

The recapture of Mars Prime was a relatively simple and straightforward affair. Questioning the prisoners separately, Garroway learned that there were only five UN troops left at Candor, while all of the rest—a total of some thirty troops plus the European scientists working for the UN—were at Cydonia.

It was a foregone conclusion that one or both of the UN cat drivers had gotten a warning off to Mars Prime, and by now, Cydonia would be alerted as well. The Marines would have to move fast.

They were able to drive right into the Candor base, steering all three cats to the vehicle bay where they parked them. Garroway had half expected a fight at the vehicle bay airlock, but when the Marines rushed through, weapons at the ready, they encountered only a curious crowd of scientists, NASA workers, and Russian technicians. As the Marines staggered into the base proper and began pulling off their helmets, the crowd burst into spontaneous applause, an applause that swelled rapidly to cheers and shouts until the large base entry foyer started taking on an almost carnival atmosphere. Several of the Marines got kissed by female techs and scientists, despite their clumsy armor and the inescapable stink of twenty-one days without washing or even shedding their armor. Some of the techs had managed to hand-letter crude signs on cardboard: WELCOME US MARINES! and USA! were the most prevalent.

The lounge area was a kind of solarium, with translucent ceiling panels that flooded the converted external tank with warm, morning light; it was equipped with foam-molded chairs and tables that gave the place an almost homey feeling. The Marines were met at the table by a smiling Captain Gregory Barnes, the MMEF’s supply officer, plus the two Marines who’d volunteered to hop back to Candor to assist him, Corporal Jack “Slider” Slidell and Lance Corporal Ben Fulbert.

“Hello, Greg,” Garroway said, extending a hand. He was still wearing his torso armor, but he’d left arm and leg pieces in the cat, along with his helmet. He was already beginning to harbor fantasies about never having to wear that hated Class-One armor again. “Haven’t seen you in an age or two.”

“My God, Major!” Barnes replied. “It’s good to see you! You were reported lost and presumed dead, you know.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“As you can imagine, sir,” Ostrowsky added, “we’ve been kind of cut off from the news.”

“The UN people running the show, well, they didn’t admit you people had left the base where they’d marooned you, at first…but they brought those two scientists, Vandemeer and Kettering, back here, and after a while the word was out that you people had pulled a vanishing trick right into the desert.”

“Glad to hear those two made it back, anyway. I was worried about them.”

“Oh, they’re fine. Holed up with their UN buddies now, I imagine, up in the commo shack. Anyway, everybody knew you were out there, though the UN brass wasn’t saying a word. Then a couple of weeks ago there was a big dust storm…”

“Yeah. It nearly buried us for good.”

“Well, there’d been a lot of activity out of here, Mars cats on patrol and shuttles going out and back. I think they were hunting for you pretty thoroughly. Then they made the announcement, usual rigmarole, that they regretted to inform us that Major Garroway and twenty-four Marines and three civilian scientists had all been lost in the storm after leaving a shelter without authorization or proper equipment. That was the last any of us heard…at least until all the excitement this morning.”

“Well, we rode out the storm all right,” Garroway said. “Maybe they really thought we were dead. Or they just didn’t want any of you going out and looking for us.”

“That could be. We haven’t been prisoners, exactly….”

“But?”

“Yeah. But. They took over Control and the commo shack. They claimed there were communications problems with Earth, but everyone knew that was a lie. They put us Marines in a separate cubicle where they could keep an eye on us. Told us we could communicate with Earth ‘when the political situation there is clarified.’ Yeah. Right.”