Ian Douglas - The Complete Heritage Trilogy - Semper Mars, Luna Marine, Europa Strike

At the moment, things did not look good….

1211 HOURS GMT

Post 1, outside the hab

facilities

Cydonia Base, Mars

Soltime +25 minutes MMT

Lance Corporal Frank Kaminski’s feet were getting cold, and he knew it was time to move on. Of all the duties assigned to the Marines at Cydonia, this was the worst. Why, he thought miserably, am I freezing my ass off up here while Ben and Slider are taking it easy down at Candor? The answer came immediately. Because you were a pussy and didn’t volunteer to go. The truth was, he’d been afraid that Slider was going to do something stupid and get them all caught. Man, I don’t think I’m ever going to speak to either of those assholes again.

After months cooped up inside the cycler, he’d thought he’d be glad to set foot on a planet again, with a real sky and the room to get out and move around some. Unfortunately, it hadn’t worked out quite the way he’d expected. The habs at Cydonia were roomier than the cycler, of course, but they were all the same drab, stark, utilitarian design, obviously worked up by an architect who thought people liked living inside fuel tanks.

And outside was worse. You couldn’t go out without wearing Class-One armor—the full rig, complete with fifty-kilo backpack and power unit. Even if that rig only weighed something like fifteen kilos on Mars, it still moved like fifty…and once you were walking, you had to be ready to dig in your heels to stop, or that backpack would keep on going and take you with it. He was used to wearing Class-Ones, of course, after long hours of practice, but it wasn’t like really being outside. The information downloading over the HUD projected across his visor was comforting, but it still felt like he was playing video games inside a tin can.

At night it was really bad. The sky was so dark. Kaminski had grown up in a suburb of Chicago, and the nights there—between the city sprawl and the monster ultraplex at Woodfield—pretty much washed everything out of the sky except the Moon. Here, the blacknesses below and above the horizon were the same; you could tell the difference only by knowing that the horizon was where the dusting of diamond-hard, blue-white stars stopped. He’d never even seen the Milky Way before, but it arched across the sky like a long, fuzzy cloud. It made him feel…lonely.

Worse though, was the cold. Marine Class-One armor was designed to serve as a space suit, but it wasn’t as well insulated as an EVA or Marsuit; it couldn’t be, not and stay as relatively light and manageable as it was. The arsenic-gallenide batteries and the micro fuel cells provided power enough to keep him warm in the day—as well as processing the air he breathed and the water he drank—but at night, when the temperature plunged to 150 below, the ground got so cold it seemed to suck the heat right out through the soles of the boots. All of the Marines wore thermal socks inside their suits, but it wasn’t enough, not on a long, four-hour watch in the icy darkness. Marines on outside watch kept warm by moving…and by spelling one another every twenty minutes or so inside the main hab’s airlock.

His watch requirements were to patrol the general area around the main hab and the C 3facility, with at least one stop per hour at the automated methane-cracking plant east of the base perimeter, the makeshift shuttle pad, and the well and freshwater storage tank to the south. It wasn’t, he thought ruefully, as though Martians were going to attack…though the black hill they called the Fortress and the empty shell of the Ship, bulking huge against the stars to the north of the base, were eerie enough to have you believing in anything after more than ten minutes or so.

He’d just completed this hour’s rounds, walking out to the fuel farm first, then swinging past the shuttle pad. Now he was trudging north through the sand, with the external lights of the base a welcome sight indeed. In their glare, he saw Groller, moving out from the shelter of the main lock. He waved, and Groller waved back.

He touched a control in the arm of his suit, switching on his armor’s comm system. You were supposed to leave it on all the time, but on low-alert status, most of the Marines kept theirs switched off when they weren’t using them to save the batteries.

As soon as he switched on, though, a blast of static crashed from his helmet speakers. Hastily, he tapped on the key that lowered the volume; the channel was completely blocked. He tried the backup…with the same result.

Damn. He saw Groller tapping the side of his helmet and knew that he was having trouble, too. That meant it wasn’t a fault in the suit, then—for which Kaminski was grateful—but a screwup with the comm center. No matter. One of them could go inside and report it.

As he walked closer, he noticed another armored figure standing in the main lock. That was strange. No one else was supposed to be—

The figure in the lock was aiming an assault rifle at Groller. It took Kaminski a frozen instant to realize that the guy was firing the rifle; he could see the rapid flicker of the muzzle flash, could see him struggle with the weapon’s climb as he loosed a burst at Groller’s back on full auto.

Kaminski broke into a clumsy run, unslinging his ATAR as he surged forward through loose sand. In the cold, the upper layers of the sand tended to freeze, the grains sticking together in a brittle crust, and each step was an unsteady stride-lurch as the crust broke beneath his boots.

Amazingly, the gunman appeared to have missed his target; Kaminski didn’t know where that stream of rapid-fire lead had gone, but it had apparently sailed past the unsuspecting Groller without coming near enough to hit him. He remembered the problems the Marines had had on the firing range; maybe the gunman was having difficulty with the local gravity as well. Kaminski came to a clumsy halt, raised his ATAR, and sighted in on the gunman.

Directly aiming a rifle in a space suit is next to impossible, if for no other reason than that you can’t get your eye close to the rear sight. The M-29, however, used a video low-light scan system that picked up the target picture through a camera lens mounted on the rifle’s back and fed the magnified image to the rifleman’s helmet electronics. In the green glow of his HUD’s image feed, he could see only that the target was wearing UN armor and seemed to be trying to brace himself against the open airlock’s seal for another shot. The laser rangefinder gave him a range of 243.6 meters. He dragged the crosshairs over the target…then cursed as the man ducked back out of sight.

Groller had seen him aim and obviously wondered what was going on. The Marine turned to look back at the main hab, saw nothing, turned again, his hands spreading in a what-the-hell-are-you-playing at? gesture.

Kaminski tried the comm channel again. Still blocked, and now he knew that somebody was jamming him. He started running again, signaling to Groller to get down, cursing wildly inside the ringing confines of his helmet.

The figure appeared at the airlock again…no, two figures, and one of them was cradling something long and vicious and deadly-looking, a rifle at least twice as long as an ATAR, and obviously much heavier and more clumsy. There was a green flash…

…and an answering flash against Groller’s backpack. A puff of white silently burst from the PLSS unit, propelling Groller forward and down.

Kaminski reached Groller an instant later. The other Marine was down on his hands and knees, wildly trying to reach behind him. It looked like his Number Two O 2, reserve tank had been breached; oxygen was spilling into the thin, cold atmosphere, the moisture in the tank freezing as it emerged in an icy fog.

Damn! He could exchange fire with the unknown attackers, or he could try to save Jim Groller. That was no choice at all. Dropping his rifle, he skidded in on his knees, one hand steadying his friend while the other groped for the emergency cutoff valve that would close the system before it bled Jim’s precious air into near vacuum. Shit! The suit was breached too…the active camo surface was scorched away beside the burst O 2tank, and frost was forming rapidly around a hole a little narrower than the width of a pencil.