Martian Rainbow Page 3

  A tiny electronic chime rang at the back of Boris's helmet. It was 0800. At the same time his suit radio started to buzz with noisy static. Something must have gone wrong with his radio. Boris tongued the volume down. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Boris saw something moving rapidly across the surface of a nearby hill.

  That's impossible! he thought, as he turned his shoulders to get a better look.

  It was a shadow ... no ... four shadows ... moving directly toward them.

  He then noticed that Vladimir had stopped holding on to the casting and was trying to come to a stop while looking upward. Boris looked up, too ... and let the casting go on its way.

  Floating slowly down from the sky on soft gas jets were thirty-six armed soldiers in armored spacesuits with a charcoal-gray camouflage pattern matched to the color of the soil of Deimos. The holes in the ends of the thirty-six accuguns each looked as big as the orb of Mars, and Boris had to squint his eyes against the flickering stabs of laser light that streaked back and forth on his body as the troopers slowly fell to the surface to form a large circle around them. The static in his suit radio grew louder and Boris knew that it would be useless to try to call for help.

  Boris and Vladimir waited in silence, their hands in the air, while the man in the spacesuit with the distinctive captain's bars on it made his inexperienced way across the surface toward them. A lunar lope did not work on this moon.

  While they were waiting, they felt a slight rumbling in the ground. The heavy casting had finally plowed its way into the surface some tens of meters away.

  AS 0800 had approached, Alexander had been under the visor, his eyes scanning the Battle Control Center, looking for blinking trouble lights. Having found none, he had relaxed a little, and at 0800, when the attack started, he had nothing to do. The icons of everyone in the Battle Control Center were ignoring him and were either talking to each other or looking at their consoles.

  He found the viewscreen in the back that gave an overhead view of the attack on the main base at Olympus Mons. The picture came from a satellite and was made up of a combination of passive infrared and reflected starlight images. One of the first attack landers had already landed, out of sight of the base, in a distant crater. Its quartermaster ship had pulled up beside it, while its medical ship was back a kilometer. The landers had the six-pointed Star of David, being from the Israeli spaceship Shalom that augmented the U.S. Third Squadron. These were one of the three long distance "heavy artillery" attack groups that were going to take the fight out of the base.

  Alexander shifted his glance back through the Battle Control Center to find the flight leader of the Israeli contingent. As he did so, he noticed that the computer had shifted the position of the U.S. First Squadron off to the side of the imaginary room. The icons of Colonel Bradshaw and Admiral Takahashi were faded in tone and still. The lights on their consoles were a soft, steady green, and their subordinates with their consoles had been erased from the volume. The attack on Deimos must be over already—and a success. He looked down at his status board. No losses yet.

  Alexander found the Israeli console. The icon of the Israeli flight commander was looking over the shoulder of one of his group captains at the captain's console screen. The computer printed their names in midair below their faces, Colonel Yitzhak Begin and Captain Ben Shamir. Alexander looked at the captain's console screen and deliberately widened his eyes. Immediately he was seeing what the group captain was seeing.

  If any of the commanders had used their battle visors to look around the imaginary Battle Control Center to find Alexander at that time, they would have seen Alexander's icon looking over one shoulder of the group captain, while the flight leader's icon looked over the other shoulder.

  It was dark, so the group captain and all his men were seeing by using the high-sensitivity helmeyes that looked out the top of their helmets and fed the processed output into their faceplates.

  "GAMMA Squad!" Captain Shamir said. "Help the quartermaster set up those missile launchers. The sooner you get them up, the sooner you can shoot them."

  Six men got up from the lip of the crater, where they had each been adjusting a combination console and telescope that was used to guide the precision munitions. The quartermaster left his four stevedores to finish erecting the missile launchers for the Beta Squad and led the Gamma Squad into the cavernous hold of the supply ship.

  "Alpha Squad hooked up and armed, sir!" said a voice that was stereoed off to the left. The captain turned his helmeyes to the left, and Alexander saw a line of five troopers peering through their precision aimers over the crater rim toward the Neocommunist base some kilometers distant. Their sergeant was facing the captain.

  "0810. Very good, Sergeant Meier. We may beat the Brits and Canucks to the target yet. The first round to the target should take out the balloon dome over the central plaza. Fire and keep firing until there isn't a structure over two meters high still standing. But keep those missiles high. We don't want to really hurt anyone." His last words were partially muffled by the roar from five fiber-optic guided rockets with pointed noses and large hooked fins.

  Alexander glanced at one of the troopers controlling one of the speeding rockets and widened his eyes. Instantly he was seeing what that trooper was seeing—he was in the nose of one of the rockets, streaking low across the cratered ground. Ahead were two other rockets, and far off to the left he could see another barrage of five missiles coming in from either the Canadian or Great Britain missile unit. The lead rocket ahead of his rocket ripped through the heavy fabric of the central plaza dome, and the second rocket finished the destruction, as a fountain of dust and tons of precious oxygen and nitrogen exploded upward into the thin Martian atmosphere.

  The trooper controlling Alexander's rocket directed it toward the top of a corridor. The rocket smashed through the fabric heading above an airlock and flew down the corridor, its top fin ripping up the ceiling. There was a brief image of someone, halfway into a pressure suit, scrambling down the corridor, then the missile was back outside.

  Alexander blinked back to the attack captain's visor. All three of the squads were now active, firing one missile after another. Overhead roared the main wave of attack landers from the U.S. Third Squadron, each followed by its medic and quartermaster ship. The attack landers landed about a half mile from the now-tattered target building.

  Now that the attack had started, the sky was turned on. High in the sky over every battlefield, the Battlefield Illumination Team of the Signals Group unfurled huge multikilometer reflectors in space that sent down beams of sunlight that literally turned night into day for kilometers around.

  Alexander blinked his way back to the Battle Control Center and looked down at his status board. Both moons, the South Pole base, and Solis Lacus already taken. Eight troopers wounded, none dead. No known enemy dead, but some wounded. They still had the four biggest bases to take: the ones at Olympus Mons, Melas Chasm, Hellas Basin, and the North Pole. He looked around the imaginary room. The icons of many of the squadron commanders—their objectives taken—had faded off into the corners of the room, their subordinates erased from the volume. He glanced at the brighter icons. They were all busy and their lights were steady and white.

  He found the U.S. Third Squadron complex and reentered the battle around Olympus Mons. This time he found himself looking out the visor of a group captain the computer identified as Captain Ralph Wilson. The captain was looking at a map with his quartermaster. The captain was physically nowhere near the quartermaster, and the map existed only in computer memory, but they both pointed out spots on it, and each one could see where the other one's "hand" pointed.

  "I want nestguns here, here, and here," Captain Wilson said.

  "You got 'em," the quartermaster said agreeably. "I got lots more. You want one over here, too?" he asked, pointing.

  "Why not?" Captain Wilson said. Then—unaware that Alexander was figuratively inside his helmet with him—continued, "Alexander the Gr
eatest would stomp me under the high-rise heel of one of his gold-spangled boots if I let one of my men get so much as a stubbed toe."

  Alexander's eyes narrowed. He would not forget the name of Captain Ralph Wilson. The visor image flickered slightly as the computer tried to interpret his eye signals. Alexander opened his eyes to normal and the scene continued.

  The heavy nestguns, hovering their heavy load of pellets and fuel on partially curtained jets of generated gas, were led out of the hold of the quartermaster ship by the four stevedores. The quartermaster fed their computers the map coordinates and the nestguns waddled their way forward into their places.

  "They're all yours, Captain," the quartermaster said, turning over the controls to the nestguns. As he did so, four tiny gun icons appeared in the captain's visor. The icons were superimposed on the image of the nestguns in the visor when the nestguns were in sight, or tucked in the corner of the visor when the nestguns were out of sight.

  The captain must have done something with his tongue or eyes, because the nestguns went into automatic mode, swiveling back and forth, using generated gas to shoot pellets at random times at obvious targets in the distant buildings, such as windows, doorways, or holes big enough to shoot out of. The pellets were the same ones used in the accuguns. Sharp enough, fast enough, and slippery enough to puncture nearly anything, but small enough that they were more likely to wound than kill.

  "All right, troops," Captain Wilson said over the command channel, "into your foxmobiles. We're moving in."

  The foxmobiles were mobile foxholes. Almost a meter high and two meters in diameter at the bottom, with tapered sides of light armor leading up to a manhole in the top, they had six tilted retractable wheels that could be used in various combinations to move it around. The foxmobile didn't have the power or traction to carry a trooper, too, so either it was moved into position and the human ran to it and jumped in, or the trooper crawled along the ground inside while the foxmobile did its best to keep up with him.

  Like a chess master, Captain Wilson kept his troops in their foxmobiles, supplying covering fire from his nestguns while shifting them into position for the next attack. Alexander watched with grudging approval as Captain Wilson concentrated on the weak point in the base, a breech in an outer lock to a cargo bay that led off in three different directions.

  "Ready a wire-guided rover with a pellet head," Captain Wilson said to the quartermaster.

  "Already done," the quartermaster replied. "You want me to put the rover in the center of the bay as usual?"

  Alexander could see the intensive training pay off. For months, these two men had taken the troops through weekly practice attacks on a mock-up of this base on the Moon, wearing weights to simulate the greater gravity of Mars.

  "Right. With the pellet beamers set to shoot down the three corridors," Captain Wilson said.

  "Way ahead of you," the quartermaster said. "Ready when you are." The voice of the quartermaster was artificially stereoed so that the quartermaster seemed to be right next to Captain Wilson's left shoulder.

  All around the captain were the voices of his troops muttering to themselves. Over the secure spread-spectrum radio links, each voice was artificially stereoed so that it seemed to come from the physical direction of that trooper in relation to his captain. Knowing the links were secure, the troopers talked and passed on information as if they were a group of noisy, novice hunters passing through a wood.

  "Still quiet on this side," a squad leader to the left said. "Saw some movement through a porthole a little while ago, but no shots have been fired."

  "I wish to fuck we'd do something," a soldier muttered from front center. He gave a muffled grunt as if he was trying to change position inside his foxmobile. There was a shot and a muffled curse.

  "Goddammit, Captain! They got me in the hand! I was just holding the top edge to shift my weight and the bastard got me! I'm sorry, Captain."

  "That's okay, Parker," Captain Wilson said with an audible sigh. "I'm glad it isn't too serious. Everybody hold up and keep down while we get Parker out of here. Turn on your medic light, Parker."

  Off in the distance, Parker's half-hidden foxmobile sent up a telescoping rod with a blinking red light on the end.

  "Medics on the way," said a voice stereoed to the right rear of Captain Wilson's helmet. A simulated rushing sound indicated the approach of the hopper on its jets of generated gas. As the hopper approached the enemy building it slowed and rotated around 360 degrees to show those inside the building the lack of weapons and the multitude of red crosses. It then proceeded to the blinking red light. The two medics put the hopper down next to the foxmobile as the injured trooper climbed out. They slipped a heated mitten patch over the injured hand, tightened the sealing band around the forearm of his spacesuit, and pressurized the mitten.

  "I'm sorry, Captain," the trooper said again as he climbed into the stretcher pod between the two medics.

  "Good-bye, Parker," the captain said sadly. The medics lowered the top of the stretcher pod over the injured man, pressurized the pod just in case, and flew the trooper back to the waiting medical lander.

  Captain Wilson turned his attention to the damaged lock that waited in the distance. Murmurs came from the troops around him, muted by the communications control program.

  "Alpha Squad will enter the airlock right after the rover!" Captain Wilson commanded. "Beta Squad will follow up in their foxmobiles. Gamma Squad will redeploy outside as backup."

  "All right Alphas," the squad leader said. "I want to see you tripping over that rover wire as it goes in."

  "Fire rover!" Captain Wilson said, and a simulated roar sounded in back of everyone as the rover shot forward on its four down-pointed jets and flashed between the troops, who were already starting to move slowly forward inside their foxmobiles. The rover slowed as it neared the entrance to the airlock and brilliant strobe lights and an occasional shrapnel pellet shot forward, providing cover for the attacking troops. As the rover passed each foxmobile, the trooper inside jumped from shelter and ran after the flying machine, the wheeled foxmobile doing the best it could to keep up with the legged human over the rough terrain. One of the troopers stumbled momentarily as he was tripped up by a nearly invisible and nearly unbreakable optical fiber left from the initial missile barrage.

  Alexander noticed that the leading attack trooper ran funny—another damn woman—taking chances just to prove she was as good as a man. She was inside the airlock with the rover when it exploded, sending pellets in all directions—except back toward the troops that it had protected during their advance.

  "All clear in here, Sarge!" a soprano voice said.

  Captain Wilson and Alexander watched the Alpha Squad leader as he deployed his troops to guard the three corridors entering the airlock. He first made sure they were all tucked into their foxmobiles, which had ambled in after the fleet-of-foot humans, then hunkered down in his own foxmobile, his helmeyes scanning back and forth above the lip of the foxmobile.

  "All secure, sir!" the squad leader reported.

  "Beta Squad!" Captain Wilson said, but the squad was already in action. Their spare foxmobiles were already taking up positions in front of Alpha Squad, and troopers were dashing from the safety of their outside foxmobiles to the inside ones.

  "White flag! Hold your fire!" said an override voice that was stereoed as if it came from above. It was Captain King from the attack group to the right.

  "This is Signals," another override voice said. "We have a surrender message coming over most channels."

  Objective taken, Alexander thought. But spoiled. Just because one stupid trooper got his hand in the way of an enemy bullet.

  Alexander heard a whisper from over his left shoulder. It was the urgent message voice of his communications control computer. Alexander had it programmed to imitate the sultry voice of a most amazing blond bombshell he once knew. He would never ignore that voice no matter what the circumstances.

  "Urgent messa
ge from the Sixth Squadron at the North Pole," the computer said breathlessly. "They are having trouble subduing the base there and are asking permission to attack unarmored enemy individuals with missiles."

  Alexander blinked back from his close contact with Captain Wilson and looked at his status board. All objectives had been taken with the exception of the base at the North Pole. Total casualty list, two dead and fourteen wounded. As he watched, the count jumped to fifteen wounded. Another trooper had been hit at the North Pole. Alexander looked out into the imaginary Battle Control Center and found the icon of the commander of the Sixth Squadron, Colonel Melrose. Colonel Melrose was looking at him expectantly. Alexander widened his eyes and the icon image zoomed in and turned into real-time video.

  "We have the base surrounded and subdued to the point where they are no longer shooting at us, but they still refuse to surrender. The real problem is that three enemy individuals had been out exploring the polar ice cap in a crawler and returned after our attack was under way. They surprised a quartermaster ship when the men were outside busy deploying hardware, knocked them down in the snow with those big, balloonlike wire wheels on the crawler, and took their accuguns, ammunition, and some hand-thrown miniseeker missiles. They're back up on a nearby glacier cliff, shooting down at us. At that angle they can shoot through the top of a foxmobile unless you keep the hatch closed."

  Alexander glanced away from the video image, and it shrank as he searched out a particular screen on the back wall of the imaginary control center. He found the screen. It contained a computer-generated map of Mars covered with numerous slowly moving, blinking dots of various colors that indicated the objects in orbit around the planet. The dot indicating his personal lander was a bright golden color. It had just passed over the equator in its polar orbit and was approaching the North Pole of Mars. He shifted his glance down to the icon of the woman sitting attentively at his feet at a pilot's console.

  "Drop me down at Boreal Base, Betsy!"