Semper Mars(126)

“Pretty damned hot, Major,” Lieutenant King said, crouching in the sand next to him.

“They’re dug in and they’re waiting for us,” Garroway replied. He brought the rifle—and his arms—back down under cover. Every Marine there was well aware that what might be a light wound on Earth would, here, almost certainly mean death as the armor’s air poured out through a bullet hole. “We can’t take them frontally.”

“Hey, you think the beer-bombing idea’s gonna work, Major, sir?” Corporal Slidell asked. He was lying on the ground on the other side of Lieutenant King.

“It damned well better, Slider,” Garroway replied. “If it doesn’t, we’re in a hell of a fix…and we’ll have thrown away the only beer within a hundred million miles.”

“You can say that again,” Slidell said. “Sir.”

King held his own rifle above the embankment for a look. “Hey, Major!” he said. “Have a peek!”

Garroway raised his rifle again, careful not to lift it far above the dune. This time, he could see a lobber drifting through the sky just beyond the enemy lines. As he watched, a tiny object flipped out of the lobber’s side, spilling dozens of smaller objects as it fell. The reaction in the UN lines when the objects hit was immediate and spectacular. Men were leaping out from behind the low ridge, some slapping at themselves, others firing at the lobber overhead, and the rest running as fast as their cumbersome armored suits would allow.

“You know,” King said, “I think we’ve just added a new secret weapon to the Corps’s inventory. Beer bombs!”

“Yeah,” Slidell added. “My beer!…”

“Sacrificed in a good cause, Slider,” Garroway said. “We were not issued ordnance sufficient to the needs of this mission. We therefore improvise, adapt, and overcome!”

“Yeah, I guess. Look at them blue-tops run!”

A ragged volley of gunfire snapped out from the Marine lines, tearing into the UN troops who were shooting at the lobber. Several toppled over backward, falling back into the trench. Others dropped their weapons and started to run.

“Let’s go, Marines!” Garroway shouted. Rising, he struggled up through yielding sand to the top of the dune, then lurched over the top. A bullet struck his armor with a sharp spang; he pivoted, targeting the UN soldier who’d fired, and sent back an answering burst. The man tumbled back out of sight, dead or simply knocked down, there was no way to tell.

Not all of the UN troops had run, and those still in place opened up with a devastating volley. Their line was broken, however, by the sudden attack by the lobber, and as the Marines charged, those in the trench wavered, then began falling back.

One Marine to his left—Marchewka, he thought—flung up his arms and pitched back down the face of the ridge. An instant later, Corporal Hayes’s helmet exploded in fragments and pink-tinted white vapor. For seconds, the charge wavered…and then the Marines were surging forward, firing from their hips as they jogged across the sand.

Ahead, another case was flung from the lobber, scattering cans of beer in a terrifying bombardment of steam and ice and sticky, golden liquid.

Broken, panicking now, the UN troops were running….

1714 HOURS GMT

Cydonia Two aboard MSL

Harper’s Bizarre

50 meters above UN Positions

South of Cydonia Prime

1429 hours MMT

“We’ve got about five more minutes of fuel at this rate, guys!” Elliott called over the intercom. “You’d better think about where we’re gonna set down!”

Knox looked at the remaining cases of beer in the cargo bay. There were three left, and he hated to break off with bombs still on the racks. “Bring us around to the base, Captain,” he replied. “One more pass, and we can touch down by the Fortress.”

“Roger that. Hold on. I have to grab some altitude.”

The lobber’s thrust increased briefly, boosting them higher. Below, he could see at least a dozen UN soldiers, fleeing their trench line and jogging north as fast as they could, leaving several bodies and a large number of weapons lying in the sand.

The Marines were swarming over the former enemy works now. Some of them were stopping to pick up discarded weapons; there’d not been enough to go around, of course, and some of the Marines had charged the UN works unarmed.

They all had weapons now, however, as they continued to pursue the Foreign Legion troops toward Cydonia Prime.

As the lobber began descending again, Knox saw a small mob clustered around the outside of the main hab’s airlock. Most of them, he thought, were UN troops caught in the earlier attack against the parked vehicles, trying to get back inside.