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

But he was going to follow through with the one, if that was what it took to uncover the truth about the other.

“I think you’re making a mistake,” Vandemeer said, “but it’s nothing worth fighting over.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Louis,” Alexander told him. “The truth is always worth fighting for.”

SUNDAY, 27 MAY: 2308 HOURS GMT

Heinlein Station, Mars

Sol 5636: 1045 hours MMT

“So, you got your lines down?” Garroway asked. It was crowded in the hab’s single, small airlock, with seven Marines and several bundles of equipment. “It’s show time!”

“I’ll have ’em eating out of my hand, Major,” Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky replied.

“Just so you keep them drooling long enough for us to pull this off,” he replied.

“Hey, not a problem,” she replied, laughing.

He couldn’t share her exuberant, almost cocky enthusiasm. There was too much at stake here, and far too many things could go wrong.

Ostrowsky was wearing one of the civilian archeologist’s space suits. The name on the chest read DRUZHININOVA. It had been her idea, actually, and Devora Druzhininova had gone along with it. The Marines’ helmet visors were nearly opaque with the HUD displays up. The civilian suits were lighter, and they sported goldfish bowl helmets that were transparent save for a slight blue tint to screen out the ultraviolet.

It meant that the UN troops inside the Mars cat would be able to see that Ostrowsky was a woman. An attractive woman, buzz cut and all.

Sex, as Ostrowsky had reminded him, always sells.

The airlock’s pressure matched the air pressure outside, and a red light winked on overhead. “Okay, radio silence, everyone,” Garroway said. The hab walls would block the relatively weak UHF transmissions of their suits, but once they were outside the enemy would be listening to them. Turning, he touched the outer-hatch control. The door popped open, and they stepped out into the crisp, red-gold clarity of the Martian surface.

The scene was breathtakingly beautiful, gold sand beneath a cloudless sky that was pink on the horizon, but shaded to a deep and empty ultramarine overhead. All seven Marines—Garroway and Ostrowsky, Caswell, Donatelli, Foster, Jacob, and Kaminski—made their way in single file out of the airlock and around to the side of the hab that partly blocked the line of sight to the Mars cat, some fifty meters away.

They’d made several trips out through the airlock already, lugging along the pieces of the big Westinghouse portable drill unit…and some other things, carefully hidden with the bundles of tubing, condensers, heating coils, and batteries. The drill was portable in name only, a device weighing half a ton that could be assembled in an hour or so and had power enough to drill through tens of meters of hard-packed sand to reach the icy permafrost layer below. Once a hole had been opened, drill tubing with a heated head was lowered to the bottom and the permafrost melted to a thick slurry of mud and water. Most of the water vaporized as it melted into near vacuum; collectors at the drill head captured the vapor and condensed it into liquid, which was pumped into storage tanks for later use.

Such drills were responsible for opening Mars to large-scale human operations like the bases at Candor and Cydonia; besides drinking water, they provided both oxygen and the hydrogen for converting atmospheric CO 2into the methane used by the shuttles. A wellhead had already been set up a few tens of meters to the north of the hab, but the Marines would be expected to start a new well right away; since all water on Mars was frozen, no one well site lasted more than a few days—a week at the most, depending on how many people were based at a given hab—and new wells had to be constantly sited and drilled.

The point was that the watchers would not find their work particularly suspicious. After a few moments, Ostrowsky left them, walking toward the cat with her arms out from the sides of her body, a white cloth in her right hand. “Hello!” she called. “You in the cat! Can we talk?” At least one person in the UN detail must speak English.

“Remain twenty meters from the vehicle,” a heavily accented voice replied over the general talk channel. “What do you want?”

“A ride out of here,” Ostrowsky replied. “For the women. I was wondering if we could strike a deal with you guys.”

“What kind of a deal?”

“No deal,” a second voice added. “We have our orders.”

“Oh. Come on,” Ostrowsky said. “You think us girls want to be locked up with these guys for the next three months?”

“You’re Marines,” the second voice replied. “Didn’t you just spend months cooped up with them on the cycler?”

“At least we had some privacy! We had our own head! Look, there’s gotta be something we can work out. If you could take us back to Mars Prime, maybe we could, I don’t know, make it worth your while, y’know?”

“Well, you’re going to have to be more explicit than that. Exactly what did you have in mind?”

“Well, gee, I don’t know.” Garroway could hear the slink in her voice, could imagine her shifting her hips in that lightweight EVA suit. “We could maybe work something out. But I gotta see you guys face-to-face if we’re going to negotiate. I don’t want…I mean, we’ve got people listening in, y’know?”

The other Marines continued their work, setting up the drilling rig’s legs and connecting the fuel-cell array to the motor. As the banter continued, Garroway nodded to the others. Caswell, Donatelli, and Foster continued assembling the drill, while Garroway, Jacob, and Kaminski moved to a point where they were screened by the rig and found the armor sections that were waiting for them.

Marine Class-One armor could be broken down into eighteen separate parts. One was the front half of the cuirass, a single curved piece of kinevlar that covered the chest and torso. Earlier, several Marines had brought the portable drilling unit out and set it up around at the back of the hab, opposite the structure from the watching Mars cat. They’d brought out three cuirass front halves with the rest of the drilling and collection equipment, and left them piled with other equipment on the cold, hard ground.

Momentarily out of sight of the cat and its crew, Garroway, Kaminski, and Jacob dropped flat to the sand, each of them taking one of the torso armor sections. With the armor propped up in front of them then, they began crawling clumsily across the sand.

Active camouflage was an effect created by the layer of memory plastic coating the metal, requiring only sunlight or a trickle of body heat to work. Lying flat on his stomach, Garroway kept the cuirass out in front of him, bracing it by wedging the bottom edge into the sand, and holding it upright with straps wound tightly about his gloved hands.

In a sense, it was a high-tech version of a very old device…the shield. By keeping the half of an armor torso shell out away from his body, he was blocking the heat signature of his own suit. A careful scan from the Mars cat would almost certainly pick up the heat plume rising above his body in the cold, thin air, but with Ostrowsky out there talking to them, he didn’t think they would be paying that much attention. The active camo on the outer surface, meanwhile, would blend in with the surrounding landscape. So long as he and the others moved slowly, without sudden jerks or movements, they stood a good chance of making it up close to the crawler unobserved.

“How many women are there?” another man’s voice said, as the radio conversation continued. The exchange would help the Marines keep track of what was going on inside the cat.

“Five,” Ostrowsky replied. “Four Marines and a civilian.”