Battleground Mars (14 page)

The whole room waited in silence with baited breath.

“The Eastern Star was carrying a spare set of Hughes-Kettler air scrubbing equipment. It had been here in the stores for several years, it had never been used. The chief engineer at the time decided to ship it back to Earth to be re-certified and overhauled. I guess he intended to replace the system we have here. When the ship crashed, everyone forgot about it.”

“You mean the spare parts we need are in the hold of that ship?” Fechter asked, incredulously.

“Well, they were when it took off.”

The room erupted with shouts of triumph. Men were punching the air, and already bonuses that had been expected to be reduced to zero were being re-calculated.

“Hold it!”

They stopped and looked at Rahm.

“What’s the problem?” the manager asked him. “Do you think the equipment may have been damaged in the crash?”

“I don’t know about that, Jacques. We never got to the cargo hold, because the ship is half buried in dust and sand. That includes the cargo hold.”

The room went silent again as their hope was snatched away.

“Can you get to it?” Fechter asked.

“Maybe. I’ll take my crew out again at first light. Damian, we’ll need your people too, the Taurons are pretty active in that area.”

The militia leader nodded. “We’re with you, whatever you need.”

“And Gabi is right. We’ll need some of the portable scrubbers. Damian, if you bring five of your people and Gabi can come with us, which makes twelve in all.”

“And the rest of the scrubbers?”

Fechter was looking at him intently.

“I’ll issue six to the doc, that’ll have to be enough. As for the rest, one to each crew. One each for the engineers, they’ll need to do the work on the machinery when we get back. And you can take what’s left, Jacques.”

“How many will that be?”

“One.”

He ignored Tobin Ryle’s look of rage and hate and took his crew aside with Gabi to plan the mission. They left the following morning, glad to be away from the swirling crosscurrents suspicion and intrigue that had infect the Mars Base. There had been none of the normal activity, crews running backwards and forwards, loading and unloading, suiting up for the next shift. Instead, there was only a quiet watchfulness. It occurred to Rahm that if they failed to bring back the machinery to fix the air scrubbers, they’d have as many enemies here inside Mars Base as they did outside.

The journey back to Huygens’s crater was uneventful, but not because there were no Taurons trying to block their way. Far from it, they were there, watching from the distant peaks and cliffs. Every man, driller and militia, was aware of them. There were small signs, movement where no movement should have been. Small dust clouds. On one occasion they’d seen a pair of them in the distanced. They were standing next to one of their own peculiar shaped drilling rigs. Each ignored the other, as they weren’t here for a fight. This time they took a different approach, heading south through the Plain of Xanthe, turning before they hit the bewildering maze of Mariner Canyons. Then they turned east along the Meridian Steppe until they came to the deep crater in which the Eastern Star laid, in its final resting place. Damian and his men stayed at the top with the two buggies, Rahm led the rest of them down into the crater and through the still-open hatch of the ship.

“How deep would you estimate the cargo hold is?” he asked Kacy. She was the technical expert, with the ship’s plans stored in her tablet.

She looked at the schematic. I’d guess it’s two decks below where we’re standing.”

She walked around the nearby cabins. “Yeah, that’d be about right. Two decks down.” She pointed to a hatch. “We need to make a start through here.”

Saul stepped forward and unclipped the steel lever and swung it open, just as Rahm was shouting, “no, leave it, wait!”

It was too late, a cascade of dust and sand poured through, leaving them knee deep. Nathan Wenders stepped forward with a spade.

“I guess this is where we start.”

Brad and Kaz followed him and shoulder to shoulder they worked to remove the debris that blocked the way to the hold. Kacy found pieces of alloy sheet from the broken internal walls and used her tools to fashion a chute. Saul and Rahm helped her to form a continuous, downward trough that led out of the airlock door and down into the crater. When they’d finished, they started to shovel the debris that the others had moved into the chute where it slid downwards in to the depths.

Every twenty minutes Rahm patrolled around the ship, making sure that it was still stable. His concern was that removing the weight of sand would unbalance the wreck and cause it to tip and slide downwards into the bottom of the crater. There’d been one or two bad moments when it gave a tiny lurch, but so far nothing to give any cause for alarm. He went back inside and continued shoveling. It took them six hours to clear the sand through to the cargo hold and there they had their first piece of luck. The airlock doors to the hold were largely undamaged, when the broke through they shone their torches down into a cavernous space that had not been invaded by the sand. The alloy crates containing the air scrubbers were tumbled into a huge heap, mixed together with the rest of the ships cargo.

“Was she carrying anything else that may be useful to us, Gabi?”

She swung out her tablet and checked through the datacard.

“There’s just the usual stuff, drilling equipment going back for repair. Oh yeah, they were carrying the surplus supplies of thermite explosive, I don’t think that would be any use to us. They stopped using that stuff years ago, it’s too dangerous.”

Rahm and Packer exchanged glances.

“Am I thinking what you’re thinking?” Saul asked. “It would be just as dangerous to the Taurons as it is to us?”

Rahm nodded. “We’ll take the thermite too. Kacy, make sure you identify all of those crates so that we only take out what we need. I don’t want to drag a load of unwanted stores back to Mars Base.”

They all laughed, remembering the story of the relief ship had had brought in twenty cases of baby milk. The transport cost from Earth would have made that the most expensive baby milk in the universe. When they’d stopped laughing at the absurdity of the situation, and the fate of the fool who had messed up their stores, the cooks had taken charge and merged the milk into their daily meals. For several months, everything they ate had the sweet taint of baby milk.

They spent two valuable hours carrying the crates up the ships ladders to the outside, where they were stacked. Rahm checked with Damian again, but there was still no sign of any Taurons. Saul tried to laugh it off.

“Maybe we’re going to get away with it, Rahm. They can’t cover every inch of the planet.”

“Saul, you know that they check out drilling sites to see what kind of yields we’re getting. That means they will be over at the Schiaparelli Crater. How can they be over there and not notice us here? They always send out patrols to sweep the area around their operations. No, what worries me is that they’re here and we haven’t seen them.”

“Damian’s people will keep a watch for them, they know their business.”

He nodded. “They’re good, I know that. But so are the Taurons.”

Only a few miles away, Granat watched the human activity around the Huygens Crater. He was stationed at the top of the Tyrranha Plateau, where he would sweep the area with his high-intensity optical scanner. He knew about the wreck inside the crater, of course. They’d watched it go down several years ago. Surely it was beyond repair, what could they be doing with it? He thought for a few moments, made a decision and summoned one of his troopers to him.

“Bakkar, I want you to go down to the Huygens crater and snoop around. Try and see what the humans are doing and beam images back to me here.”

“Yes, Sir,” the soldier acknowledged. “If they discover my presence, do I have permission to shoot my way out of trouble?”

“Only after you have sent the images, Bakkar, not before. A firefight could prevent you from getting your mission completed successfully. No shooting until after you have sent the images.”

“And if they shoot first in the meantime?”

“You will continue filming the inside of the crater and make sure you send the images back to me. Understood?”

“I understand, yes, Sir.”

They both understood. It was a suicide mission, in the best and finest traditions of the Tauron warrior caste.

“Goodbye, Bakkar.”

The trooper nodded and trotted off.”

Back inside the crater, Kacy had rigged up a block and tackle to hoist the crates to the top. There were twenty crates in all, fourteen with the Kettler-Hughes equipment and six with the thermite charges. Each crate took fifteen minutes to haul up to the lip of the crater and load onto the buggies. Five hours before they would be finished, so far, they were only half way. Rahm watched the eleventh crate begin its journey to the top. Saul was looking on anxiously.

“It’ll be dark before we’re done, we’ll have to watch our backs on the journey back. Thank God for these portable scrubbers, we’d have been out of air before the job was done.”

Rahm nodded. Buggies always carried tanks to top up when they were out on the surface, but there was no air to be had other than what they carried. He caught a slight movement out of the corner of his eye. When he looked around there was nothing, but he had to be sure.

“Saul, take a look at the lip of the crater, about five hundred yards from where we’re standing.”

“Taurons?”

“Could be. We need to check it out. Go over the rim and a few yards down the other side, work your way around him. I’ll wait until you’re in position and take him from the front. I’d sooner they didn’t know what we’re doing here.”

Saul nodded and slipped away. Rahm waited ten minutes and then started towards the place where he’d seen the movement. Halfway there, he drew his weapon and made sure it was ready to fire. Nearer and nearer he walked, forcing himself to keep going on. If there was a squad of alien monsters hiding on to of the crater’s rim, he could expect them to start shooting at him at any moment. So far, there was no sign. He drew nearer and nearer, still nothing. Maybe he was mistaken. Then the ground seemed to rear up as the monster leapt up in front of him. The Tauron had a Flakka fighting knife in his hand, aimed directly as Rahm’s guts. He twisted to avoid it and saw it whistle past his stomach, missing his pressure suit by no more than millimeters. He stepped back a few inches to give himself space, for a ripped pressure suit could be fatal. They had enough problems with air shortages without him creating any more.

He leveled his gun and saw his opponent hesitate for a moment, then lurch forward. They were incredibly fast, and he barely had time to get off a shot before the creature was almost on him. He fired again, but the shots were only slowing it, not stopping it. On the ground beside the alien was some kind of scanning equipment and Rahm realized instantly what it had been doing – sending pictures back to their base camp of their activity in the crater. Had he managed to get it working before he came up on him? He’d have to assume that he had. That meant they’d have company before long, he had to warn Damian Hacker. But before he could do anything, he had to deal with the monster that was coming at him again. He fired, three shots in quick succession, the creature staggered and then flung itself forward. It caught his hand holding the gun and the weapon was sent spinning out of his hand. He stood his ground and drew this knife, facing the monster in the most primal way. Man to man, knife to knife. The creature lunged and he twisted away again, slashing with his knife at the scaly throat that appeared in front of him, but it was like trying to cut steel. The blade merely glanced off and he had to dance back again to stop the Flakka knife from plunging into his pressure suit. As he moved his foot touched a loose rock and he felt himself stumbling, the long, slow motion fall in low gravity to the crater rim. The Tauron stood over him, its lips drawn back in a very human looking expression of cruel triumph. He prepared to throw himself to one side when the knife blade flashed down, but the creature stopped, stiffened and then crashed forward. He had to roll out of the way to stop it dropping on top of him. The body had a huge hole in the back of it, above it stood Saul Packer.

“I thought you might need a hand.”

Rahm nodded. “Thanks, but I’d got him where I wanted him, overconfidence was about to make him make a mistake.”

“Yeah, I could see that.”

They both smiled. In truth, both men knew how close it had been.

Granat watched the scene from Tyrranha Plateau. He’d seen it all, the images of the crates being hauled up from the ship, the approach of the human, the fight with Bakkar and the cowardly shot that had killed him. He’d died a good death, one that any of his comrades would be proud of. More importantly, Granat now knew what they had retrieved from the wreckage of the ship. Some of the crates carried explosives, and he ignored them, for they were just another mining tool. But the others contained air scrubbing equipment. His portable console had interrogated the markings and discovered the nature of the machinery. That was interesting. They wouldn’t have gone to this much trouble if they hadn’t been desperate for the equipment. So they were short of air. How could he exploit that particular problem? He’d have to give it some thought. The humans were even more reliant on air supplies than the Taurons. They’d experimented with captured air bottles and found that their enemies breathed a similar combination of oxygen and nitrogen. One of his warriors had even volunteered to breathe the mixture to see how it affected them. He’d died, of course, but not before they learned valuable lessons about their enemies. He keyed the combinations that would send the recording back to their base camp and then across their superfast transmission to Tauron. Once the technicians and scientists had analyzed it they would be able to offer suggestions for how to exploit the human weakness. Perhaps it would be enough to rid the planet of them for good. He carefully packed up his own equipment and started back to the drilling site at Schiaparelli Crater. If it was as productive as they’d thought, they’d exceed their quotas. That would give them time to put together a major offensive against these human lice. The instructions from his home planet, laid down by none other than Tabor, Lord and Dictator of the Universe, were clear. They needed trevanium, at whatever cost. Nothing was to interfere with the flow of the precious mineral. Nothing was to stop the quotas being fulfilled, and they'd made it clear that the penalty for failure was an ignominious death. But afterwards? Ah, that was different. Afterwards, they could slake their thirst on the blood of these inferior creatures who’d dared to lay claim to what his race was entitled to by right.