Ian Douglas - Semper Mars

“Roger that!”

Loosing a final long burst of gunfire down the stairwell, Warhurst turned and started running toward the Peregrine. He’d only come about three steps, however, when an explosion ripped the red metal door from the stairwell shed and knocked the Marine captain flat.

Fuentes started back down the ramp. Warhurst saw her and waved her back. “Get away!” She heard his voice over her transceiver. “Get the hell away!”

A machine gun opened fire from the roof of one of the neighboring buildings, striking sparks from the pavement between Fuentes and the downed Marine, smacking into the Peregrine with a chilling, metallic thunk-thunk-thunk. Instinctively, she dropped, searching for a target. The machine gun kept firing, aiming for the transport.

“We’re taking hits!” the Peregrine’s pilot called over her earpiece. “We’re taking hits! We’ve got to go!”

“Go! Go!” Warhurst shouted. “That’s a goddamn order!”

Mexican troops burst from the smoking stairwell shed, firing wildly. She saw Warhurst rolling over, saw him fire into the charge, saw him go under. Sergeant Walsh dragged her up the ramp as the pavement dropped away beneath her. The TR-5 was airborne, boosting itself into the sky as gunfire probed and chattered after it.

“You couldn’t have gotten to him,” Walsh told her.

“Damn them!” she yelled, battle lust and horror and frustration and rage all boiling from her in a nightmare of raw emotion. “Damn them!…”

One hundred feet above the embassy, the Peregrine’s pilot banked the aircraft slightly, giving the Zeus gunner a clear field of fire. For three or four seconds, a solid line of tracers, like straight, hard, green lightning, licked at the embassy roof, smashing into and through the structure in a cataclysm of detonating HE rounds and depleted uranium penetrators. Fuentes, still watching from the half-opened ramp of the aircraft, saw dozens of troops trapped in that deadly beam, transfixed, then torn apart and scattered by that searing whirlwind of death and utter destruction.

The embassy roof, what was left of it, collapsed in flame and boiling smoke.

We never leave our own behind….

But she had. Damn it, she had….

SATURDAY, 12 MAY

Earth-Mars Cycler Polyakov

1417 hours GMT

“All right, people!” Colonel Lloyd bellowed. “Listen up! We got us a major change of plans, here.”

Lloyd waited as the buzz of speculation and grumbling died away. Most of the MMEF’s Marines had been gathered in Polyakov’s storm cellar, in full Class-One armor, with weapons and HUD helmets. Those not mustered in were watching through the unwinking eye of the television camera mounted on the bulkhead.

“What kind of change, Colonel?” Sergeant Ken Jacob called out.

“Yeah,” Corporal John Donatelli added. “We gonna get to go kick ugly space-alien butt or not?”

The others chuckled, and several gave one another gloved high-fives.

“No, but I’m gonna kick some ugly Marine butt if you assholes don’t simmer down.”

James Andrew Lloyd knew he had a reputation for being hard on the men and women under his command. In fact, he gloried in that rep, cultivating the image of a hard-as-nails badass the way other men cultivated wealth or success. It had been that way for as long as he could remember. The United States, nearly a century after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, guaranteed equality for all…but there was still that unspoken assumption, strongest in the black, middle-class families like the one James—never “Jim”—had grown up in, that blacks and women had to work extra hard, had to go that extra kilometer, just to prove that they really had what it took.

James Lloyd had been taking that extra kilometer for a long time, now. Hard work and a no-nonsense attitude had led to his graduation cum laude from the University of Michigan, followed by both OCS and Marine Aviation Flight School. He’d flown a Harrier IV in Cuba in ’24, led a platoon by airdrop into Colombia in ’27, and seen combat since in Panama, Greece, and Andhra Pradesh.

While the fact that he was black had helped define his career, he rarely thought about it now. The Marine DI who’d run his OCS class had been black; an oft-quoted motivational expression of his was an old Corps theme: “There are no black Marines. There are no white Marines. There are only amphibious green Marines…and right now I want to see nothing but amphibious green blurs!…”

Colonel Lloyd thought of himself as amphibious green.

“Our original mission profile,” he told them as the noise died away, “called for off-loading to a Mars Shuttle-Lander, followed by a descent to the primary base at Candor Chasma. Those of you who’ve read your mission profiles—maybe I should say those of you who can read—know that Candor Chasma is on the Martian equator…about five thousand kilometers from Cydonia, which is where we’re ultimately supposed to be deployed.

“A new set of orders has come through from Earth, however. The MSL pilot has been ordered to take us directly to Cydonia. The bulk of our supplies and matériel will be sent to Candor Base, as originally planned. We will take with us what we can ferry along in the one MSL.”

“Aw, shit, Colonel!”

Lloyd turned a hard gaze on the Marine who’d spoken. “You have a problem with that, Corporal Slidell?”

“Sorry, sir…but damn it, what about all our supplies and shit?”

“There is no effective difference in the new deployment,” Lloyd said patiently, “at least insofar as our equipment is concerned. We would have had to off-load our gear at Candor, then repack what we needed to carry along aboard another MSL and redeploy by suborbital hop to Cydonia. As we needed spares or whatever, they would have been sent to us on the regular supply runs. We’re just cutting out one extra hop for us.” He studied Slidell’s stricken face, wondering what was going through the man’s head. “Be happy, Slider. The lot of you would’ve spent a day or two unloading shipping containers at Candor. Instead, you all get to sit on your fat, happy asses, guarding sand dunes at Cydonia.”

“Yeah, but it ain’t fair, jerkin’ us around like that,” Slidell said.

“Easy, man,” Lance Corporal Ben Fulbert told Slidell. “Ice down.”

“The Corps never promised you fair, Slider.” Lloyd decided that he would have to keep an eye on the man. He seemed just a little too upset by the change in plans.

“Why the change, Colonel?” Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky wanted to know. “I thought everything had to channel through Mars Prime.”

“When they tell me, Ostrowsky, I’ll tell you. In the meantime, we follow orders.” He hesitated before adding, “Let’s just say that HQ is concerned about the friendliness of our reception. So we go in sharp, and we go in with Class-Ones. Questions?”

There were plenty of questions—there had to be with this crowd—but no one spoke up. Hell, he had questions, and none of them could be answered yet.

The change had come through only a few hours before, coded, and marked Secret and Eyes Only. INTEL BELIEVES UNFMC TROOPS SHIFTED TO MARS PRIME REGION LAST 72 HOURS, the report had stated. The United Nations Force, Mars Contingent, numbered fifty men, almost twice the number in Lloyd’s Marine platoon. If they’d shifted south from Cydonia to the Mars Prime base at Candor Chasma, it could be because they planned to confront the Marines when they landed.

Or possibly not. Bergerac, the UNF’s new CO, was aboard the Polyakov. Maybe they were just getting ready to throw him a welcome-to-Mars party.

But Lloyd firmly believed that a little healthy paranoia was good for a man…and especially for Marines who planned to die in bed. That was why he’d ordered the platoon to assemble here in full armor, complete with weapons, HUD helmets, and full field gear. It made the storm cellar a bit crowded, and the deorbit was gonna be hell, but at least they would be ready, no matter what was waiting for them on the ground.