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

“I don’t know,” the voice came back. “That’d make it mighty crowded in here.”

“Aw c’mon! You guys could think of something!…”

There were just two problems with this plan, one foreseen, the other a difficulty that Garroway hadn’t even thought of until he was on his belly and slowly inching toward the objective. The foreseen plan was the trouble he and the other three would have seeing their objective. They’d allowed for that by working out their choreography with Ostrowsky. She was to walk to a point twenty meters away from the crawler’s door; by keeping her in view and the crawler blocked by their shields, the strike team could close on the target even when they couldn’t see it.

The unforeseen problem was worse. Garroway had forgotten how fiendishly cold the surface of the Martian desert was. The air temperature stood now, according to the readout on his helmet HUD, at minus fourteen Celsius, but the ground, hard-packed sand and loose gravel, was still a literal deep freeze. His armor’s best insulation was on the soles of his boots, and the frigid ground seemed to leach the heat out through the front armor of his Class-Ones like a sponge soaking up a spill. He hadn’t been on his stomach for more than ten minutes before he started shivering inside his armor. He’d already taken the precaution of disabling the thermostat of the suits—there was no sense in giving the UN heat sensors an easy target—and within a very few minutes more, all three of the slowly advancing Marines would be in danger of frostbite, or worse.

What the hell am I doing here? he asked himself. There’d been plenty of volunteers for this assault…and the more he thought about it, the more he knew that the role he’d assumed should have been given to someone younger, tougher, and possessing faster reflexes. He was feeling old…and the feeling grew worse the closer he crawled toward the objective.

“We might be able to work something out at that,” a voice from the Mars cat said. “We’re supposed to pull out of here in a day or two. We might be able to find some room for you women at that. Maybe….”

“Well, okay,” Ostrowsky said. “Let me go in and talk to the other girls, okay?”

Ostrowsky had promised to keep the soldiers in the cat talking until the Marines in the assault team had crawled to within twenty meters of their objective. Now she was walking slowly back toward the hab.

Garroway was shivering hard now, as he angled around toward the rear of the Mars cat. The cat’s engine was in the rear, along with the radiators and waste-heat spills. From there, he and the others should be able to sprint the last few tens of meters to the vehicle without being picked up by its sensors…if they could rise from the icy sand and move now. Judging his position from the angle of the hab, he carefully lowered the shield, just enough to steal a glimpse of the Mars cat past its edge.

Right on target. He was looking straight on at the rear of the vehicle, from a distance of about fifteen meters.

There was still no indication that they’d been seen. Garroway looked about, checking the positions of the others.

Ostrowsky was clear. If they had anything on the ball, the UN troops would be searching the area for anything amiss…but with luck their IR scan wouldn’t pick up the three Marines in the heat shadow of their own power plant. Garroway waited…waited…watching for some overt reaction, and when there was none, he dropped the armor segment, scrambled to his feet, and sprinted forward.

His body was so cold it was more of a lumber than a sprint, but he covered those last few meters and sagged against the Mars cat’s starboard track. He spared a single glance for the hab, knowing that Lieutenant King was watching, was signaling the others to start the next phase of the plan. Working on the assumption that there were undiscovered listening devices still scattered about the hab’s interior, several of the Marines should now be starting to discuss what they were going to do to get rescued. They wouldn’t actually discuss anything; the idea wasn’t to have the UN guards radio for help, but to gather around their radio, trying to make out what the prisoners were saying.

And in the meantime, Garroway, Jacob, and Kaminski had reached the cat’s door.

Jacob was an electronics expert, like Garroway had been when he was an enlisted man. He held up his weapons—Radley’s pliers and one of the smuggled pocketknives—and nodded his readiness. Garroway held Ostrowsky’s fléchette gun…and hoped once again that he’d be able to work the thing if he had to. Even with the trigger guard removed, he was having trouble feeling anything at all through the fabric of his glove, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to manipulate the trigger.

With his other hand, he did a quick, three-fingered countdown, two…one…

Garroway hit the emergency airlock entry switch, which slid the outer door open immediately. Kaminski set one booted foot on the rung of the ladder going up the vehicle’s side, then scrambled up to the roof, where the small sat dish hung on its yoke, aimed almost directly straight up. A couple of quick turns on the locking release, and the satellite dish swung easily in its mounting, aiming uselessly at the horizon.

Jacob was the first into the airlock. Both he and Garroway had worked on Mars cats before, during their mission training on Earth and in simulation during the cycler passage. There was a maintenance access panel in the tiny compartment to the left, and in seconds Jacob had popped the cover and was wrist-deep in the wiring on the other side. Garroway braced himself in the airlock’s outer hatchway, Ostrowsky’s fléchette pistol aimed head high at the inner hatch, just in case somebody tried coming through. Overriding the airlock’s safeties, which prevented both hatches from being open to vacuum at once, was a relatively simple matter of cutting, stripping, and crossing four sets of wires, but the process took an eternity of seconds…and the UN troops on board would have known” something was going down as soon as the outer hatch cracked open.

“C’mon!” Garroway said, keeping his eyes on the inner hatch. It was the first thing spoken since they’d left the shelter of the hab. “Damn it, c’mon!”

“Almost…got it…shit! Can’t feel…a thing…through these…damned gloves…”

Kaminski dropped to the sand outside the airlock, Doc Casey’s knife at the ready.

“Here she goes!” Jacob yelled, and then the inner hatch was sliding away as a swiftly strengthening wind blasted out into the airlock. A swirl of loose paper and garbage followed—a couple of readymeal packets, some plastic wrapping, an empty memclip case—and then the hurricane was past and an armored figure with a light blue helmet was swinging into view, framed in the open hatch.

Garroway had been gambling that however many men there were aboard the Mars cat, most would not have their armor on. The stuff was bulky and uncomfortable and made such essential details as urination a tedious chore—or forced the wearer to wire himself up with uncomfortable plastic plumbing. Someone, at least, would be in armor at all times in case of an emergency…but the whole plan would go seriously wrong if several of them happened to have been wearing their suits.

The EVA-suited man in the hatch, staggering a bit still from the shock of the abrupt decompression of the cat’s cabin, was raising a French FA-29 assault rifle to his shoulder. Garroway was already in position, the Ruger pointed straight at the UN trooper’s helmet visor. He squeezed his hand almost convulsively; he felt nothing through the glove, heard nothing in the thin air but a sharp snap, but a white star appeared squarely in the center of the dark visor, and the soldier dropped his rifle, staggering back, groping at his face.