The door of the machine room slid open, and I saw a flood of colors. The vents in the ceiling showed orange. The furnace generating the heat looked yellow. There I found more of that green mist. It seemed fresher this time; very little had darkened and settled on the floor. Whatever that green shit was, I wanted nothing to do with it.
The door on the far side of the machine room was open. Three Boyds stood right outside the door—short, slender orange silhouettes with yellow coronas. I could see the clawlike fingers. I capped the first two as the third one turned to face me. He was too late. I shot him in the shoulder as he spun. His momentum tripped him. As he fell, he tumbled into the green goo. His screams were so loud that I heard him through my helmet.
His heat seemed to charge the mist as he fell into it. It swirled around him, and purple liquid oozed from his body. It was not blood. The blood of the other two Boyds registered red in my heat vision. The liquid was purple and viscous. It seemed to seep from his body and did not spread on the floor.
Elite SEALs, the Republic’s most deadly killing machines…They had to have been Huang’s idea. How many trained killers would Huang send to annihilate a platoon of Marines? He would probably send a single squad against our three—thirteen of his men against our forty-two. Arrogant bastard.
I had no way of knowing how many enemy SEALs my men might have capped as they entered the motor pool. The battle might already be over, though I doubted it.
I needed to return to the control room. It all made sense. The herding tactic, the strange stains on the concrete floor and the mattresses—they were using Noxium gas—the gas that Crowley tried to use on us in Gobi. It was heavier than air. That was why the ducts that dispensed the gas on the elevators leading to the Kamehameha’s Command deck were built into the ceiling. The gas would form a fog along the ground—a fog that registered light green as it chilled and dissipated in the environment.
Hiding in the control room, using computer equipment barricades for protection, my men would be easy targets for a Noxium gas pellet.
I leaped over bodies as I ran toward the control room. If they had not jammed the interLink, I could call to my men and warn them. Ours was a battle against the senses—the SEALs left us deaf, we left them blind.
I rounded a corner and slid to a stop. On the ground before me lay the three men I had rescued outside of the storage area. They were dead, probably shot, but a thin green mist swirled like a swarm of flies near their bodies. The SEALs were dissolving the evidence.
The gas had not spread far. I knew that I should have backtracked around the motor pool, but I needed to get to the last of my men. I needed to warn Gubler and Marsten. Taking a meaningless deep breath that would offer me no protection, I edged my way around the walls of the room, never taking my eyes off the slowly melting bodies.
The panels on the far side of the hub slid open as I approached. The three Boyds standing on the other side of the door proved a lot more alert than the ones outside the machine room. I barely had a moment to drop to one knee before bullets struck the wall above my shoulder. I returned fire, hitting one of the three SEALs in the chest. I continued firing, but missed the other men as I hid behind the open door.
The Boyds had night-for-day goggles. I should have known that they would. As I prepared to spring out, I heard the muffled clink of something metal against the concrete floor. I was lucky to have heard it through my helmet. A few feet in front of me, a green cloud started to spread across the ground.
I had a brief moment to react. Jumping to my feet, I lunged over the canister and into the open hall, shooting as I flew through the air. I hit one of the Boyds. But I landed hard, crashing face-first into a wall. Dazed, I rose on one knee, spun, and fired several more shots.
My head and shoulders stung and white flashes filled my eyes as I struggled to slide away from the door—away from the gas. I could see the jade-colored cloud rising in the darkness. Beyond it, I saw something that looked like a long, purple carpet across the floor of the corridor to the control room.
Something struck hard against the side of my helmet, knocking it off my head. I toppled to my elbows, barely conscious at all. I felt around the floor for my pistol but could not find it.
“You failed, Lieutenant,” a high-pitched voice purred. “Your team is dead.”
“Get specked,” I said. Without my helmet I was completely blind, and there was a spreading cloud of Noxium gas somewhere nearby.
Out of the darkness, something grabbed the back of my armor and pulled me to my feet. The Boyd slammed me backward against the wall. I hit hard and fell back to the floor. I moaned and tried to crawl to my feet. The Boyd slashed his sharp fingers across my face, gouging deeply into my cheeks. He kicked me, and I slid across the floor toward the barracks…toward the gas. I started to sit up, but he knelt, his weight on my chest, and swiped another claw across my face. He pulled me to my feet, then shoved me backward.
My armor did not clatter when I landed. I landed on one of the SEALs I had shot a few moments earlier. Patting the ground behind me, I felt an arm and traced it. My hand reached the dead man’s forearm as I felt myself being lifted. I felt my attacker slice his claws across my face a third time, and I fell to the floor.
I landed on the dead Boyd’s arm, and there it was. I felt the bulge of a pistol under my back when I landed. Barely able to breathe through my badly ripped mouth, with blood pouring down my face, I turned on my side and grabbed the gun.
I felt weight on my shoulder. The Boyd stepped down on me, pressing his foot into my throat and allowing the sharp toe of his boot to dig into my jaw. I hoped he could see clearly as I raised the pistol and fired three shots up the side of his leg.
CONCLUSION
It was only a matter of time, really. The Kamehameha would wait for a signal from its SEALs. When the signal did not arrive, a second team of SEALs would come down to investigate. That team would find me bleeding and weak and finish the execution. The job was three-quarters done already.
Feeling around on the floor, I found my helmet and tried to switch to night-for-day, but my eyes twitched so erratically that I could not access the optical menus. I would spend my remaining hours of life lying blind on this floor, praying that the Noxium gas did not reach me.
When I awoke, I found myself on a narrow cot with a blanket pulled over my knees. I was in some kind of prison or cage, but the door was left open. I tried to sit up and bumped my head. My whole body ached.
“Still want to be a Marine?” a familiar, rumbling voice asked.
“Freeman? Is that you?” I asked. “How did you…”
“Klyber sent me to get you.” Freeman called back. “He contacted me before they even escorted you off Mars.
“He left you a message. Check the shades by your bed.”
There was a pair of mediaLink shades on the floor. It hurt to lean over the edge of the cage to grab the shades, but I forced myself to do it. My hands trembled too much to slip the shades in place. After a moment, Ray Freeman’s giant hands pulled the shades from mine, and he slipped them over my eyes.
Freeman let me know that he found you. When I heard that Admiral Huang arrested you on Mars, I didn’t know what to expect.
A lot has happened over the last few days. You may not know it, but the Cygnus, Perseus, and Scutum-Crux Arms have all declared independence. They call themselves the Confederate States. In response, the Linear Committee has shut down the House of Representatives.
We have a lot to discuss, Wayson. But for now, you must stay hidden. Huang thinks you died on Ravenwood, and you should do nothing to make him think otherwise.