Semper Mars(128)

He stopped, looking up and toward the right, where the squat shape of the shuttle was dropping rapidly toward some storage habs close to the main structure.

“First Section!” he yelled. “With me! The rest of you, hit that main hab!” He started running toward the falling shuttle as fast as he could manage, loose sand flying with every step. Most of the UN troops, he noted, had stopped fighting. Some were standing about with hands raised. Others were simply standing. More and more of the MMEF Marines were having to stop and take charge of prisoners.

But some were still very much in the fight, and Garroway wanted to get to the shuttle before they did.

1717 HOURS GMT

Knox

Cydonia Prime

1432 hours MMT

They jumped. For a dizzying moment, Knox and Ostrowsky, still holding hands, fell with the fairy-tale slowness of falling bodies in one-third G. When they hit a moment later, they struck sand, hitting hard but rolling apart as their legs gave way beneath them. Knox ended up on his back, staring at the huge, spidery shape of Harper’s Bizarre, which seemed poised to come down on top of his head.

Then it passed him by, one landing leg colliding with a nearby ET module, which knocked the vehicle askew and sent it toppling onto its side. He half expected to see the ship burst into flame, but without oxygen it simply crumpled, its lightweight framework giving way beneath the impact. He tried to rise and his left leg shrieked pain…broken or sprained, he couldn’t tell. Dropping again, he turned to look toward the south, where a number of angry-looking blue-helmets were rapidly closing on his position.

“Oh, shit.” He grabbed his ATAR and took aim, squeezing off a short burst…and another…and another, shifting aim each time to a different target. Two of them dropped. The others wavered as he continued his one-man stand, some of them trading fire with him, until, as though by common consent, they scattered and broke for cover.

“Ostie!” he yelled over the general comm channel. “Ostie! Can you hear me?”

No answer. He saw her lying a few meters away, unmoving. “Captain Elliott! Do you copy?” No answer there, either.

A round careened off the side of his helmet, a glancing ricochet. He turned his attention to the front again, returning fire with deadly precision and grim will. Another running blue-top spun wildly, collapsed, and lay still.

1717 HOURS GMT

Kaminski

Cydonia Prime

1432 hours MMT

PFC Kaminski froze in place just outside the main hab. A UN soldier had just stepped through the airlock and was hurrying toward the fighting…but he’d not seen the Marine standing rock-still just ten meters away. Let’s hear it for chameleon armor, Kaminski thought, as he pivoted his ATAR into line with the man and squeezed the trigger.

The UN soldier spun, collided with the slender flagpole in front of the hab, and collapsed. The battle was sputtering out now, with many of the surviving UN troops raising their hands. Kaminski looked up at the blue UN flag hanging from the pole and shook his head. That would never do….

“Hey, Slider!” he called. “Fulbert! Gimme a hand!”

Together, they grabbed the flagpole and hauled it up and out of the hole dug in the frozen ground to receive it. Ellen Caswell and Doc Casey trotted over to help, and in seconds, the pole came down, dragging the blue flag aflutter behind it.

Kaminski was prepared. He’d recovered the grit-scoured US flag that had flown from the Mars cat for the past three weeks and packed it in his armor’s thigh pouch. With a couple of lengths of vacuum tape supplied by Doc, he began to fasten the flag onto the pole, while Caswell yanked off the UN banner.

More gunshots sounded close by, and a round slapped into the sand by their feet, but they kept working….

1719 HOURS GMT

Knox

Cydonia Prime

1434 hours MMT

Knox ducked and rolled as a stream of rounds slammed into the side of the Mars hab close by. He came to his knees, taking aim once more, when a blur of motion from his left caught the ATAR and ripped it out of his hand. He rolled to the side, looking up; an armored figure in a blue helmet loomed above him, a French rifle aimed at his head. “Do not move, American,” the man said, his accented voice sounding over the Marine frequency. Knox remembered the voice, as he remembered the name stenciled on the armor: Bergerac. A second man trotted up behind the first, and Knox heard a torrent of French.

“Pas de problèm, Lieutenant Dutetre,” Bergerac said. “We will use them as hostages for—”

A silvery something struck Bergerac in the side of his helmet, bursting in a golden spray. Knox rolled to the side, snatching at his ATAR, bringing it up just as Dutetre took aim at another figure standing in front of the crumpled wreckage of the ship. Elliott! She’d dragged herself clear of the wreckage and thrown a can of beer at Bergerac, and now Dutetre was about to shoot her down.