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

And the Marines were left alone in the desert.

SUNDAY, 27 MAY: 2038 HOURS GMT

Heinlein Station, Mars

Sol 5636: 0815 hours MMT

“I talked to Doc Casey,” Garroway told the others at the table. “He didn’t have all that much time to check them over, but he said he thought both the colonel and Groller were going to make it. The colonel probably has a concussion. Groller’s worse. Depressurization injuries and third-degree burns in his side, but he should be okay, too.”

“Thank God,” Lieutenant King said. “What we have to do now is decide what we’re going to do. Any ideas?”

“Don’t know about you boys,” Ostrowsky said with lazy indifference, “but I’m kinda partial to skinning the fuckers alive.”

It was chilly inside the hab, cold enough that moisture was condensing on the inside walls and partitions. Most of the Marines had elected to keep their armor on for the time being, removing only their helmets, gloves, and backpacks, while his team still wore their EVA suits. Their breath showed as puffs of white when they spoke. The fuel cells were charged, however, and the heater units had been switched on. Sergeant Jacob, who’d checked the circuitry, had announced that the place should approach something like room temperature by midday.

It was also noisy. Most of the Marines in the room were on their feet, scuffing back and forth, talking loudly, even shouting, making as much of a racket as they could. It was possible that there were microphones hidden, and Garroway needed to discuss some things with his senior people that he didn’t want to share with their UN guards.

Despite the cold, it hadn’t taken the Marines long to get settled in. Like the habs at Cydonia, this one was little more than a large shell from a Shuttle II fuel tank, fitted out with an airlock, a floor, a few lightweight partitions, and a minimum of creature comforts. Perhaps half of the hab’s volume was taken up with supplies—mostly packaged readymeals, enough for thirty people for 150 days.

If ever there was a splendid reason to escape a prison, Garroway thought wryly, that was it. Five months of readymeals, together with their edible packaging, was going to be a gastronomic nightmare.

Garroway looked at each of the people sitting about the small, plastic table in turn, feeling mingled fear and…pride. This was not exactly the sort of situation the Corps had taught him how to handle, but these were good people. Good Marines. The best….

“So where are we, anyway?” King asked the others at the table. “Not Candor Chasma.”

“No,” Garroway agreed. “Not Candor Chasma. It has to be one of the outposts.”

“Yeah,” Lieutenant King said. “But which one?”

Garroway glanced up, his gaze sweeping across the large and mostly empty compartment—empty, of course, save for the Marines shuffling around and talking as loudly as they could. They couldn’t possibly have found all of the listening devices hidden in the hab.

It had been a foregone conclusion that, since UN troops had stocked the place for them, they’d also left a remote mike or two and were listening in from the warm comfort of their Mars cat outside. Hell, what else could they do out there, except maybe play endless hands of cards?

And if hidden microphones were a possibility, of course, so, too, were hidden cameras. The AVT-400 series used in Marine recon UAVs, for instance, were smaller than the tip of a man’s little finger, were powered by ambient light, and could transmit images on IR or UHF frequencies for a distance of half a kilometer. Without special electronic bug-hunting gear, the Marines might never find them all.

And so, as soon as they’d filed in through the airlock and started pulling off their helmets, Garroway had organized the Marines into bug-hunt teams, sending them throughout the hab in search of anything that might conceivably be a listening device or camera. Within twenty minutes, they’d turned up three cylinders the size of a wrist-top’s power-up key, each less than half a centimeter long, one in each of the two living areas, and a third in the tiny ’fresher and shower cubicle.

As he’d sat at the table and mashed each cylinder in turn beneath his thumb, Ostrowsky had commented wryly that maybe the UN guys had just wanted to do some private peeping at the girls in the shower. Garroway had agreed with a laugh, but the spycams had him worried. There weren’t many places in the empty hab to hide even cameras as small as these, but there could well be listening devices scattered all over the place; there were remote mikes as small as the head of a pin that would be impossible to discover without going over every square centimeter of all three rooms, walls, ceilings, and floors, with a magnifying glass.

After the bug sweep, Garroway had ordered an inventory taken of everything that might be of use in the hab…including anything that the Marines had managed to sneak in with them from Cydonia. He’d used hand signs, though, to indicate that only routine items like food or clothing were to be announced out loud. Everyone in the hab was aware that there were probably uninvited listeners.

Then he’d called the meeting of his senior staff, gathering them close around the plastic table where the secret inventory could be laid out and discussed. He was pretty sure there were no hidden cameras close enough to the center of the big room that hidden watchers would be able to see anything significant; there could be microphones in the deck under their feet, of course, but if they spoke indirectly, and in low-voiced whispers, where necessary, they could avoid giving too much away. Just to be on the safe side, he’d ordered the other Marines to walk around the inside of the hab, circling the seven at the table set up in the middle, talking loudly, swearing, laughing, or just plain scuffing their feet, making noise enough to drown out the whispers completely over a range of more than a meter or two.

Eighteen Marines could make one hell of a sonic scrambler when they put their minds to it.

The staff meeting included Dr. Alexander, the senior civilian scientist present. Besides Lieutenant King, the only other officer in the little band, he’d brought in his senior NCOs, Gunnery Sergeant Harold Knox and Sergeant Ellen Caswell, from First Section, and Staff Sergeant Kathryn Ostrowsky and Sergeant Ken Jacob from Second Section. He’d learned a long, long time ago that the real strength of the Corps was its noncoms…the experienced men and women who knew what needed to be done and how best to do it.

“Hell,” Garroway said, his voice low. The others leaned close to catch his words against the noisy background. “I don’t even know how many stations there are. Narrowing the choice down could be a bitch.”

“There are twelve,” Alexander told him. “Bradbury. Bova. Burroughs. Bear. Lots of ‘Bs.’ Clarke. Heinlein. Asimov. I don’t remember the others. They’re unmanned most of the time.”

“How do you know all of that?” Ostrowsky wanted to know.

Alexander shrugged. “We had to familiarize ourselves with the remote hab facilities. They were originally set up to allow small teams of geologists, paleontologists, and archeologists to work in the field for extended periods of time.”

“I’m beginning to think the MMEF should have had a similar briefing,” Garroway said. “The question, then, is which one we’re at now.”

“We’re close to the equator,” Alexander put in. “That ought to narrow our selection down a bit, too.”

“At the equator, huh?” King said. “Can you be sure about that?”

“I happened to look up,” Alexander replied. “One of the moons—Deimos, the one like a bright star—was almost directly overhead.”