MONDAY, 18 JUNE: 1658 HOURS GMT
Kaminski
Mars Prime
Candor Chasma
Sol 5657: 1530 hours MMT
Thirty hours after the MMEF’s triumphant return to Mars Prime, all of the Marines on base, with the exception of those on radar or comm watch or outside on perimeter sentry duty, drew up in formation in the lounge area near the main lock. Kaminski, clean and depilated now, stood at parade rest in his freshly laundered BDUs between Slidell and Fulbert. In front of them, behind a plastic table, Major Garroway sat with his PAD and an unopened can of beer in front of him. Kaminski tried not to look at Garroway but kept his eyes carefully fixed on an imaginary point somewhere above and behind the major’s head.
In addition to the three Marines, the proceedings this afternoon had drawn quite a large crowd of civilians. The novelty of having US Marines at the base, evidently, hadn’t worn off yet.
“Very well,” Garroway said, studying the three.
“Corporal Slidell, Lance Corporal Fulbert, Lance Corporal Kaminski. You three have a choice. You can voluntarily accept nonjudicial punishment, right here, right now, before me. Or, if you prefer, your cases will be held over for further investigation at such time as we return to Earth. At that time, depending on the findings of the Judge Advocate General’s office, you may be remanded for court-martial. What’s it going to be?”
What he was offering them was a choice between accepting whatever punishment he chose to give them, and going the whole trial route, complete with lawyers and the possibility of a much heavier punishment at the end.
“Uh, we’ll go along with the NJP, sir,” Slidell said.
“Fulbert? Kaminski? You both agree to this?”
“Yes, sir!” Kaminski replied, chorusing his answer with Fulbert.
“Very good. I think we can sort this thing out pretty simply. You’ve all three been charged with a variety of crimes, including negligence, reckless endangerment, possession of a controlled substance, unauthorized access to company records, fraud, dereliction of duty…” He stopped, pausing to read something on his PAD, probably their service records. Kaminski was sweating, despite the cool temperature in the compartment. “Under the circumstances,” Garroway continued, “I have decided to drop all charges except one, and that is conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline.”
Kaminski’s knees sagged, and his heart gave a surprised leap. If Garroway had wanted to, he could have hit them very hard indeed on the smuggling and reckless-endangerment charges. Conduct prejudicial was the age-old catchall charge, the one that could be stretched or chopped to fit just about anything the commanding officer wanted.
“Now,” Garroway said. “Where did the beer come from in the first place?”
“Uh, we bought it, sir,” Slidell said. “We all chipped in and bought it before we left Earth.”
“Do any of the three of you have anything to say in your own defense?”
“No, sir,” Slidell said.
“We did it, sir,” Fulbert said.
“No excuse, sir,” Kaminski added. He was relieved that Slidell was behaving himself. The guy had a sea lawyer’s attitude that could have gotten them all in real trouble. A couple of hours ago, though, Fulbert and Kaminski together had gone to Slider and told him in no uncertain terms that they weren’t going to go along with his nonsense, not this time. They would take their lumps and not try to wiggle out. Somehow, he didn’t think they could put much of anything over on Major Garroway. The guy was sharp.
“Anybody else have anything to say, one way or the other?”
“Uh, Major,” Captain Barnes said. “I’ll just say that these three are good men and hard workers. Neither Slidell nor Fulbert gave me any trouble while they were assigned here.”
“I’ve taken their records into account, Captain.” He looked at the three, then reached out, picked up the unopened can of beer, and brought it down sharply on the tabletop. “I find you three guilty as charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. All three of you are reduced in rank one grade, and restricted to base, save for necessary military duties, for fourteen days. You are also assigned extra duty for the next fourteen days, at your commanding officer’s discretion. The, ah, contraband, of course, is forfeit.”
Slidell’s face fell at that, but at this point, Kaminski didn’t give a damn about the beer. The major had all but let them off with a slap on the wrist.
“Do any of the three of you have anything to add?” They didn’t.
“Your first assigned extra duty will be to load the contraband—all of it—on board Harper’s Bizarre. Captain Barnes will tell you what needs to be done. Dismissed!”
Fourteen days restriction, when there wasn’t a damned place to go on this planet anyway? A one-grade reduction when enlisted rank was all but meaningless anyway? They’d gotten off scot-free!
Then he realized that he and Fulbert were now the only PFCs in a platoon heavy with corporals and sergeants, a private’s natural enemies.
And two weeks of cleaning out the heads. Maybe they hadn’t gotten off completely free….
1705 HOURS GMT
Garroway
Mars Prime
Candor Chasma
1537 hours MMT
As the three turned and walked away, Alexander unfolded his arms. “You went pretty easy on them, didn’t you, Major?”
“I’ll say he did,” Sergeant Ostrowsky said, laughing. “Being restricted to base on Mars doesn’t mean a damned thing when there’s no place else to go anyway!”
“There’s no real point,” Garroway said. “Technically, I suppose what they did constituted reckless endangerment, but we had a big enough safety margin in what we brought along and in our assigned mass allotment that no harm was done.”
Captain Barnes nodded. “They also didn’t go and get blind drunk, which some in their situation might have done. In fact, about the only thing I see they did that was really reprehensible was the two of them volunteering to come down here and give me a hand.”
“Yes,” Garroway said, grinning, “and in so doing, missing out on getting captured and going for a long walk in the Martian desert.” He shook his head. “I may never forgive them that one.”
“So why the nice-guy routine, Major?” Gunny Knox wanted to know. He rubbed his newly beardless chin. “Hell, back in the old Marines, those three’d’ve been skinned alive and hung out to dry.”
“The way I see it, Gunny, those three have contributed significantly to our effort here. In fact, they may have provided us with exactly what we need to beat Bergerac and his people.”
“What, sir?” Ostrowsky said, puzzled. “We’re going to give the UNers beer in exchange for the colonel?”
“Not quite, Sergeant. But we now have something we need very badly.”
“What’s that, Major?” Alexander asked.
“What every Marine prays for.” Garroway grinned. “Close air support.”
1833 HOURS GMT
Mars
Prime
Candor Chasma
1625 hours MMT
David Alexander was on his way to the base communications center when someone called to him from behind. “Hey! David! Wait up!”
He stopped and turned. It was Craig Kettering.
“Hello, Craig.”
“I’ve been looking for a chance to talk to you! Welcome back to civilization!”
“It’s good to be back.” He closed his eyes for a moment, shaking off memories of thirst, crowding, and discomfort. Most of all, there’d been the never-ending, grinding fear that something else was going to go wrong, that they weren’t going to make it. He opened them again. “How long have you been here?”
“Oh, they came by and picked us up a couple of days after you left. The grunts really had them ticked, too. They had all of the shuttles fitted out as lobbers, taking short, suborbital hops back and forth looking for you. Anyway, we’re glad you made it.”
“So am I.” He turned away.
“Hey, hey! Wait! Where you going!”
“Comm shack. I’ve got something to send to Earth.”
Kettering’s face darkened. “Not…ah…”
“I’m sending a report on what we found at Cydonia.”
The other man looked thunderstruck. “David! You can’t—”
“I’ve already published, Craig. Last week, on Usenet.”
“Damn you!” Kettering exploded. “How could you?”
Alexander folded his arms. “The UN is trying to suppress the find, Craig. I’m letting the world know about it.”
“How irresponsible can you be? You’ve ruined it for all of us!”
Alexander was fascinated by Kettering’s anger. Obviously, the man had a personal stake in this. “You’ve been talking to Joubert, haven’t you?”
“Mireille is a professional, a responsible scientist,” Kettering replied. “You should have listened to her.”
“They’re trying, she’s trying, to stop us from publishing the truth!”
Kettering reached out, placing one hand on Alexander’s arm. “David, look. I know you were upset. I know you thought the UN Scientific Authority was trying to usurp your work. I think you have a legitimate complaint, something to take up with them when we get back. But, damn it, David, don’t you see that they have a point? A good point? This information should be classified, should be kept classified, so that it can be studied by responsible experts.”
“You keep using the word ‘responsible,’ Craig, and I’m getting a little sick of it. It’s irresponsible of these so-called experts to withhold the truth from people. What happened here half a million years ago is important! It may have shaped us, who we are, how we think!”
“And what is the truth? Sorry. I sound like Pilate, I know, but what have we got? Some bits and pieces, some fragments. You know as well as I do that archeology is like trying to assemble a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, when all we can find in the box is a couple of hundred random pieces. The picture we come up with is subject to interpretation, to judgment. We see a little bit here, a flash there—”
“So what’s your point?”
“My point, David, is that the people you keep calling on don’t know what to do with the information we uncover. All you have to do is look at the record! Archeology gave to modern civilization the story of the Incas, of the Mayas, of Angkor Wat, of Sumer, of Xian’s buried warriors. And what do the people believe in? Von Daniken’s chariot-spaceships. Pyramidiots with their numerological interpretations of Giza. Little men from Mars who raised the heads on Easter Island, built the Great Pyramid, and shot John F. Kennedy for good measure. They believe in astrology, for God’s sake. In the Biblical Flood. In crop circles, flying saucers, and gods from outer space! Can’t you understand that what we’ve found here is just going to fuel all that nonsense? Every nation on Earth is being torn apart right now by conflicting cults, churches, and crackpot theories, and they’ve all been started or made crazier by the discovery of that damned Face. Hell, half the people on Earth think the Cydonia complex was built by gods who also created humans. The rest think they were demons, out to destroy God’s Word.”
“What does all of that have to do with how we do our job? There are always crackpots and fringe elements, Craig. You know that. Our job is to learn about Man’s past, to dig up the dinner leavings and the garbage and the art that’ll let future generations of archeologists put together a few more of those jigsaw pieces. It’s not to worry about how what we learn is misused.”
“I disagree,” Kettering said. “Mireille disagrees.”
“How long have you two—”
“That’s none of your damned business!”
“Sorry. But I understand. She can be…persuasive in her arguments.” He shrugged. “Excuse me, Craig. As I said, I’ve already published on Usenet. I’ve been asked to follow up with a piece for Archeology International.”
“And are you willing to accept the deaths the premature release of this information will most certainly cause?”
Alexander raised his eyebrows. “Deaths?”
“The bloodiest wars of history, the most savage butcheries and massacres, the worst bloodshed have always been wrapped up with religious differences, one way or another. We are looking at a century or more of religious warfare, Dr. Alexander. Religious warfare that will make the Hundred Years’ War and Ireland and the Jewish pogroms all look like Sunday teas. And you are contributing to the bloodshed by giving these fanatics and crackpots the ammunition they need. It’ll all be on your head!”
“The bloodiest wars,” Alexander replied quietly, “are the ones brought on by ignorance, Dr. Kettering. That is the enemy we should be fighting. And I’m damned if I’m going to be guilty of aiding and abetting that enemy.”
Angry, he turned and strode off toward the comm shack.
TUESDAY, 19 JUNE: 1500 HOURS GMT
Cydonia One aboard
MSL
Rocky Road
South of Cydonia Prime
Sol 5658: 1215 hours MMT
Garroway caught hold of an overhead grabstrap and leaned across the seated, armored forms of Sergeants Jacob and Caswell so that he could see out the tiny porthole in the ship’s bulkhead. The shuttle Rocky Road, piloted by a former NASA astronaut named Susan Christie, had been put into its lobber configuration the night before, then launched in a high-trajectory suborbital jump that was bringing the bulk of the MMEF down on the Cydonian plain just a few miles south of the archeological base there. They’d been in free fall for nearly ten minutes, and only a few moments ago Christie had cut in the main engines to gentle them in toward their landing site. There was very little sound, nothing much at all save a far-off whisper from the engines. They were making the suborbital hop “hollow,” meaning depressurized. It was easier to have everyone suited up and ready to bounce from the moment they touched down. Besides, if the bad guys were waiting for them with a surface-to-air missile, or even a decent heavy machine gun…
They were descending fast and passing now, he saw, their primary navigational checkpoint, the imposing bulk of the D&M Pyramid.
From this vantage point, the thing was enormous…a titanic structure that dwarfed the tiny lobber to an in-significant mote. It was a mountain, just over three kilometers across from north to south, two from east to west, and reaching nearly a kilometer into the sky. It wasn’t a classical pyramid in shape, of course, since it was five-sided instead of four. The term pyramid had stuck, however, because of the markedly smooth and regular sides. Even though it had almost certainly started out as a mountain, the thing had an uncannily artificial feel to it, a precision of orientation and regularity that suggested it had been reshaped by intelligence, just as the far more famous Face twelve kilometers to the northeast had started off as a mesa but been reshaped by means now unknown. Desert winds can carve natural pyramids, called vents, but those tended to have three sides only, with the sharpest angle facing into the wind; the D&M Pyramid had five sides, with gigantic buttresses at each corner. The surface was eroded so far that it was impossible to tell what it had looked like originally, but the unmistakable hand of intelligence still showed in the design and in its looming, brooding presence.
Most telling of all, though, from Garroway’s point of view, were the signs that the D&M Pyramid had been deliberately destroyed. Almost directly below the shuttle, a few hundred meters from the pyramid’s eastern face, a tunnel plunged into the depths of the Martian surface, a crater…but not a natural one. Something had struck the surface there millennia ago, tunneling deeper into the ground than a typical meteor, then detonating far below the surface. Part of the eastern face of the pyramid had bulged slightly, and a great deal of debris had cascaded down those unnaturally smooth sides.
Garroway looked up and spotted Alexander in his civilian EVA suit, pressed up against another porthole nearby. The archeologist had volunteered to serve as guide in unfamiliar terrain, and Garroway was happy to have the man along. He’d talked some with the scientist about the evidence indicating that the Monument Builders had been attacked. Archeological teams had made initial surveys of the D&M area, but outside of confirming that the structure appeared to have been destroyed by an interior explosion—and that the tunnel-crater was now blocked with fused debris—little was known either of the structure’s original purpose or of who destroyed it, and why.
Alexander, Garroway thought, was a man with a crusade, determined to seek out and publish the truth, no matter what the cost to himself…or to others. That was fine with Garroway, who’d always stood by the principle that the truth was better than a lie. I wonder, though, he thought, what we’ve unleashed back on Earth. The UN was damned sure they wanted Alexander’s discoveries buried, and they must have their reasons.
The hell with it. If this is a fight between suppressing free speech and free scientific inquiry, and shouting the truth to the world, I know which side I’m on.
With a savage jolt, Rocky Road’s pilot increased thrust on the lobber’s engine, slowing their rapid descent toward the desert. Garroway had to straighten up away from the porthole to keep his balance. Outside, red dust exploded upward past the window, sharply cutting the golden sunlight streaming in from the west.
Then there was a bump, and they were down.
“All right, Marines!” Lieutenant King called out. “Hit the beach!”
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Sergeant Jacob added. “Haul ass, Marines!”
They swung out into the central corridor, awkwardly grabbing the ladder rungs and clambering down toward the cargo deck. Garroway allowed himself to be caught up in the rush, descending rapidly, threading his way through the cargo bay, then down the ramp and onto the Martian surface.
Garroway trotted onto the sand, his ATAR—freshly drawn from the recaptured stores at Candor—at port arms, and took a wondering look around. He’d thought his weeks in the Valles Marineris had cured him of any awe over something so commonplace as scenery. The Cydonian landscape was, in a way, the opposite of the canyons and rilles on the equator, however. There, you felt hemmed in by four-kilometer vertical walls of red rock; here, the horizon was flat and far, but the various mesas, mountains, and, above all, the black-gray bulk of the D&M Pyramid thrust up into the pink-red sky like giant’s teeth, monuments to human insignificance.
The Marines spread out into a broad, defensive perimeter as soon as they hit the beach. After a moment’s careful check with various sensors, both in their suits and aboard the Rocky Road, Lieutenant King trotted up to Garroway. “The area looks clear, sir. Maybe we caught ’em napping.”
Garroway grinned behind his visor. “Well, if they were, they’re awake now. C-Prime has a pretty decent traffic-control radar system, as I recall. They’ll’ve seen us coming and know exactly where we touched down. Let’s get our people moving.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
“Sergeant Jacob!”
“Sir!”
“Set the beacon.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
They’d touched down about a kilometer north of the D&M Pyramid. Cydonia Prime was seven kilometers to the north, though Garroway fully expected to be stopped long before they got that far.
That, after all, was a part of the plan. He checked his suit’s clock. 1229 hours.
He hoped Harper’s Bizarre was on sched. If she wasn’t, Bergerac’s prediction about the outcome of this little outing was going to become entirely too accurate.
1657 HOURS GMT
Cydonia Two aboard MSL
Harper’s Bizarre
Over the Face
1412 hours MMT
“You two tucked in okay, back there?” Elliott’s voice said over Knox’s headset.
“Yeah,” Knox replied wryly. He turned and checked the armor-suited form of Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky, lying in the acceleration couch next to his. She grinned and gave him a thumbs-up. “Tucked in is one word for it, I guess. I never figured I’d end up as bombardier on an air strike, though.”
Captain Harper Elliott laughed. “And I never thought I’d be flying close support for a bunch of jarheads. Hang on. This could be a bit bumpy.”
With a shrill roar, the Mars shuttle’s nuclear engines fired, converting methane to white-hot plasma and kicking the ungainly transport into the sky. Knox felt the familiar, smothering weight of high acceleration, a weight that faded away seconds later as Harper’s Bizarre entered her suborbital trajectory. Now they were skimming across the Martian desert at an altitude of about a thousand meters.
They’d left Candor Chasma just behind the Rocky Road, but they’d followed a different flight path, landing thirty minutes later inside a crater in Deuteronilus, some one hundred kilometers east of the Cydonian Complex. There, Captain Elliott had spent the last hour refueling the main reaction mass tanks from strap-on spares, which were discarded once they were empty. This gave Harper’s Bizarre a full fuel load for the final leg of the mission.
They were going to need it. Instead of making a second high-trajectory lob, they were staying closer to the Martian surface, barely clearing some of the higher mountains, and using the shuttle’s main engines to kick them a bit higher from minute to minute, to keep them airborne in a nearly flat trajectory. It took more fuel that way, but it also reduced the chances that Cydonia Prime’s radar would pick them up on the way in.
Time passed. Knox tried not to think about it. Everything was riding on Harper’s Bizarre and her mission. Eventually, though, Elliott called down again from the cockpit. “Okay, guys, we’re coming up on the final leg here. I’ve got the beacon.”
“Outstanding!” Ostrowsky said. “The op’s a go, then!”
“Looks that way,” Knox said. The beacon meant that Garroway and his people were down and now walking toward Cydonia Prime. If there’d been no signal, they would have aborted and landed in the desert.
“I can promise you another few minutes without too many bumps,” Elliott said, “so you’d better get set up and ready now.”
“Roger that,” Knox replied. “Let’s go, Ostie.”
“I’m with you, Gunny.”
Carefully, he clambered down the ladder and into the lobber’s cargo bay. The main cargo doors had been removed, and he could look out through unobstructed emptiness to the desert and mountains drifting along below.
“Five minutes, Gunny,” Elliott called down to him from the cockpit. “You ought to be able to see ’em now.”
Clutching his safety line, which held him secure to a bulkhead support, Knox leaned out of the open hatch just enough to look ahead and down. They were traveling west, toward the sun; southwest, the impossible, smooth-sided shapes of the Cydonian pyramids rose black and mysterious from the crater-pocked sands. He looked straight down and suppressed a start. The Face, in all its astonishing, scale-of-giants weirdness, lay less than three hundred meters below. Eyes, each with the surface area of a football stadium, stared sightlessly up at the tiny NIMF lobber as it traveled overhead. The mouth, lips slightly parted, showed irregular plates that might have been intended to represent teeth, each the size of a city block.
The sight shook Knox. This close, the countless imperfections and irregularities in the rock conspired to make the mountain-sized artifact look more natural, less like something deliberately carved from a mesa by alien engineers. It was almost possible to imagine that the people who still insisted that the Face was of natural origin were right.
Gunnery Sergeant Knox was not a particularly imaginative person, and he didn’t tend to see faces in clouds or rocks or chance combinations of smudges on Rorschach tests or the grime on a linoleum tile floor. It still looked like a face to him, though, in a heavy-browed, blunt-muzzled way, and its stare from this range was distinctly unsettling, making him feel like a dandelion seed slowly drifting over a reclining human’s head.
Nonsense!. Hell, the damned thing probably was a freak of nature. It was strange, yeah, but he’d seen strange things on Earth, too. Not as big, maybe.
What was it about that thing that had made the UN willing, even eager, to go to war? It didn’t make sense….
Knox tore his eyes from the compelling, Sphinx-like skyward gaze of the Cydonian Face, staring instead along the shuttle’s line of flight. Eight miles ahead, he could see the oddly rectilinear walls of the Fortress and the enigmatic, DNA spiral of the fallen Ship. There was no denying the alien origin of that thing, though half a million years had reduced it to little more than a twisted, spiral-staircase skeleton half-buried in sand and rubble.
Elliott was guiding the shuttle along now with the main engines throttled way back, the lobber canted over at very nearly a forty-five-degree angle both to give it forward momentum and to keep it airborne. With the cargo-hold door open, Knox could step out onto what the NASA people called its “front porch,” a term that had come down from a similar platform built out from the hatch in the front of the lunar landing modules of seventy years ago. Carefully, he began clipping a set of web-belt harnesses to his armor, anchoring himself to the structure just outside of the hatch. The west escarpment of the Face fell away abruptly as he worked, giving him an uninhibited view straight down to the desert floor, seven hundred meters below.
“Okay, Captain,” he said. “I’m in position and ready for the run.”
“Roger that. Three minutes now.”
They were closer to the enigmatic spiral-shape of the Ship, now, where it lay half-buried in the ruin of the incomplete or blast-damaged pyramid that the scientists called the Fortress. Cydonia Prime, their objective, rested on a clear sweep of desert half a mile south of the Fortress. It looked out of place amid so many titanic monuments made ancient and smooth by windblown sand and the passing millennia, and nearly lost by the sheer, vast size of its surroundings.
“You ready for me out there?” Ostrowsky called over the intercom channel. “Or are you sight-seeing?”
“All set, Staff Sergeant,” he replied. “Watch your step, though. It’s a long way down.”
A moment later, Ostrowsky’s bulkily armored form appeared in the open cargo hatch. Knox braced himself across the opening as she carefully attached her own harness restraints. “Well, Gunny?” she asked. “Ready to party?”
“Yup. Let’s rock and roll. Hand me your ATAR.”
She unhooked her rifle from her suit and handed it to him. He switched on the imaging system and raised it to his shoulder. The inset TV picture on his HUD showed a magnified image of the base, half-buried external tanks, microwave mast, scattered Mars cats and wellheads, fuel farm and landing pad, assembly crane and storehouses and all the rest of the clutter attending Man’s first large-scale exploration and exploitation of another world.
He touched a control, increasing magnification. He could just make out the UN troops now, tiny, red-brown figures emerging in groups of five from the Cydonian base’s main hab and scattering across the desert.
Knox shifted aim, looking south toward the black loom of the D&M Pyramid, seven miles or so south of the Fortress. He couldn’t see the other lobber, which should have touched down a couple of miles north of the pyramid over two hours ago. He scanned the desert between Pyramid and Fortress, looking for some sign of the major and the rest of the MMEF, but couldn’t spot them. Well, no surprise there. Their active camo armor would let them blend into the desert damned near as well as the sand and rocks themselves. It was pretty clear that the UN troops knew they were coming, though. He could see them deploying behind a low ridge a mile south of the base. In fact, they appeared to be using entrenching tools to dig in.
He switched off the rifle and studied the area without the electronic enhancement. “Incredible,” he said. “Almost halfway into the twenty-first century, and the UN is resorting to trench warfare.”
Ostrowsky chuckled. “The major sure as damn-all called it right, huh?”
“I guess he damn well did.” It seemed obvious now, but when they’d been planning this operation, Knox had wondered how Garroway could so confidently expect the Foreign Legion troops to do exactly what they were doing. In Knox’s experience, the enemy never did what you thought they were going to do.
This time, though, Bergerac and his UN troops really had no choice. If they’d tried to mount a long-range assault against the Marines at Mars Prime, they would have found themselves attacking a prepared enemy. Far better to wait and let the enemy come to you. The only real option open to them was to wait until the Marines landed nearby, then rush out and form a defensive line, blocking the Marines’ advance. If the Marines landed smack in the middle of things, the Foreign Legion troops would emerge from the habs and attack them as they climbed out of the lobber. If the MMEF landed farther away to protect the lander, the UN forces would create a defensive line…exactly what they were doing now. To Knox’s eye, it looked like about half of the blue-helmeted troops were climbing into several Mars cats parked near the habs. Those would be Bergerac’s mobile forces. Once the Marines were pinned, those cats could swing wide around Garroway’s flanks, drop off their troops, and either surround the Marines or pull an end run and go capture the lobber, the MMEF’s only tie to Mars Prime. There was no activity that he could see around the two lobbers parked at the landing pad, and that fit with the major’s expectations as well. Bergerac wasn’t likely to risk his shuttle-landers in battle.
At least, not the way Garroway was risking his.
“Hang on out there!” The engine kicked them with a hard burst, and Knox grabbed a stanchion to keep from being flung against his harness. Elliott was bringing the lobber down now, balancing against the steady thrust of the NIMF’s nuclear plasma engine. Ostrowsky, working just inside the cargo bay, picked up one of the large, plastic parts-transport containers—about the size and shape of a picnic ice chest, complete with handles and hinged lid—and dragged it over to a spot on the deck just inside the hatch. They waited, then, watching Elliott’s final approach with something more than a merely academic interest.
“I’m getting waveoffs and warnings from the base command center,” Elliott’s voice said over the intercom. “I told ’em we’re a scientific explorer team returning from Utopia Planitia, but I don’t think they believe me.”
The story about a science team had been concocted as a means of buying time. Bergerac couldn’t be sure he had up-to-date information on all of the research teams on Mars, and it was at least plausible that one, overlooked, had been camping out on the other side of the planet since before the UN troops had even arrived.
Before long, though, he would either use the base computer logs to verify that no such research team existed…or he would decide he couldn’t take the chance and order his people to open fire.
It wouldn’t be much longer now, one way or the other.