After four months transvac, the pre-drop cocktail of epi and histamines makes me feel terrific, barring a slight case of the wobbles. I pay no attention to how I feel, nor do Tak or Kazak. We’re all sergeants. We’ve been here before. Our angels coordinate with fast, high-pitched screes, not likely to be heard more than a few tens of meters away. No joy. Nobody has the plan. No fresh recon. NCOs rule at last.
We know all there is to know, for now. But we don’t even know where we’ve touched down.
We bump helms.
“What strength?” Tak asks.
“A squad, no more—in this sector,” I say.
“Whatever fucking sector this is!” Kazak says.
“Northern lowlands,” I guess. “Pressure’s about right.” I scuff brown dust along the flat, rocky hardpan and point north. “DJ and some others skipped over that way.”
DJ is Engineering Sergeant Dan Johnson.
“Then let’s find them,” Tak says.
“Nothing here worth staying for,” Kazak agrees. “Terrible place for a fight—no high ground, almost no terrain. Can’t dig fighting holes in this old shit. Where are we, fucking Hellas? Why drop us in the middle of nothing?”
No answer to that.
We walk, carrying less than five hours of breath and water, armed only with bolt-and-bullet pistols that resemble thick-barreled .45s. Tak Fujimori has an orange stripe on his helm. Tak is from Oakland. He went through vac training and jump school with me at SBLM and Hawthorne. He is compact and strong and very religious, though I’m not sure what religion. Maybe all of them.
Timur Nabiyev—Kazak—wears blue tape. He’s from Kazakhstan, on exchange from Eurasian Defense. He trained with contingents of Chinese and Uyghurs in the cold desert of Taklamakan, specializing in dusty combat—then with Italians and French around Vesuvius and on the Canary Islands. Kazak is not religious except when he’s on the Red, and then he’s some sort of Baptist, or maybe Orthodox.
Out on the Red, we’re all religious to one degree or another. Soviets once claimed they went into space and couldn’t find God. They obviously never fell from high orbit in the middle of a burning bush.
The Red here is a wide, level orange desert shot through with purple and gray, and out there, to the northwest, one little scut of ridgeline, low and round. Otherwise, the horizon is unrelieved. Monstrously flat.
Skintights sport kinetic deflection layers around upper thighs and torso that can discourage rounds of 9mm or less, but no body armor can save us from Antag bolts and other shit, which closely matches what we deal. Not even our transports have more than rudimentary armor. Too damned heavy. Ours are made by Jeep, of course, mostly fold-out Skells with big wheels, but also Tonkas and Deuces and mobile weapons trucks called General Pullers—Chesties to those who love them. For important actions, even bigger weapons are delivered on wide-bed platforms called Trundles.
When a sled drops nearby. When we find them.
Sky still looks empty. Quiet.
No more drops for now.
We are forbidden from using radio, can’t even uplink by laser until—if—our sats get replaced and can scope out the territory. Then up-to-data and maps will get lased from orbit, unless there’s dust, in which case we may not get a burst for some time. Satellite microwave can penetrate all but the grainiest dust, but command prefers direct bursts of laser, and Antags could have sensors on every low ridge and rocky mound. If dust scatters our targeted beams, they’re excellent at doing reverse Fourier, pinning our location to within a few meters and frying us like flies on a griddle. So we’re hiking silent except for scree and touching helms.
If a fountain made it, it’s going to be dormant and heavily camouflaged, waiting for our magic touch. Hard to find. But if we do find one, we’ll replenish and maybe grab a nap before we’re in the shit.
Or there is no shit.
Hard to know what will happen.
After all this time, we know almost nothing about the enemy except they’re roughly our size, on average, with snouted helms, two long arms with hanging sleeves, three legs—or two legs and a tail—and they’re not from around here. Only once have I seen their scant remains up close.
If we succeed, they’re scrap and stain. If they succeed—
All physics.
I SCAN THE horizon over and over as we walk, nervous habit. The low line of atmosphere out there is brownish pink and clear except for a tan fuzzy patch near the distant ridge that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Did I miss that the last time? I point it out to the others. Could be vehicular, could be a recent fountain drop; could be Antags.
We’ll find DJ and the others, then head that direction. No sense rushing.
My angel, mounted above my left ear, follows my focus with little whirring sounds, then finishes laying out grids and comparing the negligible terrain to stored profiles. I look at Tak, then at Kazak. Their angels concur. We dropped over Marte Vallis in southern Elysium, within a few sols’ hike of a small pedestal crater the angels label EM2543a, locally known as “Bridger,” probably after some Muskie who died there.
The loess laps in low, snakelike waves across the hardpan. We cross over an X and then a Y and then a W of long, broad marks like roadways, some, we know—we’ve seen them from orbit and from the air—running for hundreds of klicks. These are not roads but wind-doodles, cryptic messages scrawled across the flats by millions of dust devils.
According to the angels, we are transiting a low plateau of ancient olivine. A second layer of flood basalt overlaps this one a few dozen klicks south. If we play tourist and venture that way, we will see that the edges of the upper plateau have sloughed, leaving irregular cliffs about ten meters high, with several meters of rubble at the base—quite fresh, less than fifty million years old.
My boot sensor is working for once and says the local dust is pH neutral. No signs of water outflow. Still, the basalt layers overlie deep, heavily fractured, and angled plates of ancient sandstone, probably the broken remains of a Noachian seabed. That means there could be underground water way below, shifting deep flows with no surface eruptions in our epoch. All same-same. Nary a sip for us. Mars is rarely generous.
Skintight injects more enthusiasm. Christ, I love it. I need it. We’re experiencing our first sol! How exciting. A sol is one day on the Red, just a little longer than an Earth day. There won’t be a pickup for at least seven or eight sols. Much longer if they can’t find us, which seems likely. We’re probably screwed.
But for the moment, none of us cares.
JOURNEYS END IN LOVERS MEETING
We walk north, saying little.
Skyrines rarely survive more than four drops. This is my fifth. So far, I’m as clear and frosty as a winter eve, but my skintight is already pulling back the encouragement.
I hate transitions.
As the cocktail slacks off, I start to think too much. Brain is not my friend. Leathery-winged shadows rustle in the back of my skull. I may or may not be psychic, but I can feel with knife-edge prickles that we’re heading into opportunity—by which I mean trouble.
With his new eyes, Tak is the first to spot the body. He swings his arm and in turn I alert Kazak. We spread out and charge our sidearms.
In a few minutes, walking steady, no leaping, we surround the body. There’s another about ten meters off, and another twenty beyond that. Three in all. The uniforms are Russian, probably with French equipment. Tak bends over the first and rolls it faceup. The skintight is still puffy. The helm plate is gruesome. Can’t tell if it was male or female.
Tak pokes his finger at his own helm, then explodes his hands away. Sploosh! Germ needles. Poor bastard was feverish in seconds, crazy for the next four or five minutes, could have even shot his or her squad before falling over and fermenting. Tak finds where the little needle punctured the fabric and ta-da gestures at its feathery vanes. He doesn’t try to pull it out. Fucking germ needles can poke up as well as prick down. They can be deployed from aerostats—large balloons—or dropped from orbit in exploding pods. Both systems spray silvery gray clouds over a couple of square kilometers. The needles, each about four centimeters long, shift their wide fletches and find you. Then they turn you into a balloon filled with bone chips and pus.