Battleground Mars (3 page)

She nodded. “They did originally, yeah. But they outgrew it so fast that they decided they needed a bigger structure. The costs of building underground are huge, so they built the new dome on the surface. They still use the original underground cave for the air scrubbers. The new base is five miles away from the cave, it’s...”

“Wait a minute, Kacy. I’m sorry to interrupt you again, but five miles away? You’re saying that they rely on a five mile long pipeline between the cave and the new dome for their life support?”

“Well, yeah, that’s what it says. Why, what’s wrong with that?”

“It doesn’t seem a good idea for the life support to be so vulnerable, five miles from your base on a hostile planet with enemy aliens running around on the warpath.”

“I’m not sure the Taurons are that bad. But I guess you’re right, it does seem strange. Maybe they found it more convenient to build the dome closer to where the relief ships land. And the scrubbers are best protected underground, so they left them there. It makes some sense.”

“Or maybe it was a way to save money.”

She couldn’t see it. He thought grimly that she could be confronted with the problem sooner rather than later. Especially if the alien threat worsened and the Taurons cottoned on to the fundamental weakness in Mars Base. Five miles away!

They had little trouble sleeping in the ship that was taking them to their new home for the next two years. The engineers who designed the ship had made efforts to deal with the problems of weightlessness. The main cabin revolved slowly to counter the worst effects of zero gravity. It wasn’t totally the same as on Earth, which was not a bad thing. Despite Kacy’s lesson about the environment of Mars, Rahm already knew that the gravity was lower than on Earth and the ship’s gravity was similar, at one sixth of the gravity they were used to. They were able to walk about normally and get used to their new home at the same time. When he awoke, he made his way to the ship’s tiny gym. Men and women were already working on the small range of exercise machines, and he found a vacant slot on a step machine that he attacked hard to work up a sweat. As slots became vacant he moved from machine to machine until he checked his watch and found that he’d spent an hour in the gym. It was enough, for he planned a similar session later. And every other day throughout the journey. He returned to the cabin he shared with Saul and took a shower. His friend was still asleep, snoring like a faulty steam engine. He began to wake as Rahm was dressing.

“Jesus Christ, this is a weird feeling, this constant low gravity. I could sleep for another day.”

“There’s not much else to do, Saul. Knock yourself out.”

He spied the bottle on the floor next to the bunk. “But I’d go easy on the sauce.”

“Don’t worry," Saul smiled. "I ration myself when I’m working in the field.”

“Good idea. I’m going to grab some chow and then head back to the library.”

“Yeah, I’ll get some exercise time in later. I’ll come and find you when I don’t feel so spaced out.”

“Saul, you are spaced out. We’re already fifty thousand miles from Earth.”

The big man grinned. “That could explain it. I’m going back to sleep.”

He turned over and started to snore again.

Rahm pushed half of his cold breakfast to one side, left the canteen, and went to the library. Kacy was there already, studying her technical manuals.

“Back for another lesson about Mars?” she asked eagerly.

“Not exactly, no.”

“What, then?”

“I was looking for something more about the Taurons.”

Her face fell. “Oh, right, the aliens. I’ve been looking for materials about them, but I can’t find anything very helpful. It’s weird, you’d think that after all of the problems they’ve had, there’d be some information we could use. I mean, if we ever come across them…”

She was interrupted.

“They don’t want to frighten people away, so they keep it under wraps” Josh DeVries, the old crew boss exclaimed as he walked in. “Do you really want to see what they’re like?”

Kacy shook her head uncertainly. “I’m not sure I want to, not if they’re that horrible.”

“We need to see them,” Rahm stated firmly. “We have to know what we’re up against.”

Josh nodded. “You’re right there, my friend. Sit down at a terminal and I’ll bring up a video clip.”

While they watched, Josh scrolled through the media directories until he found what he was looking for. A video clip tucked into a little-used directory, labeled, ‘Mars Miscellaneous’.

“I found this when I was looking for some better search parameters for mineral-bearing strata on the surface.”

He hit play and the clip came to life.

“My guess is that someone set up the camera to record a typical drilling operation, maybe for publicity purposes. Or perhaps it was for training. The rescue party found the camera afterwards, most of the data had disappeared but there’s enough to give you an idea.”

As they watched, a drilling crew in pressure suits and helmets unloaded a rig from a buggy. They piled it on the surface and a technician monitored the remote console while the drillers wrestled the equipment into place at the spot the techie indicated. They saw the drill start to turn. Then two shadows appeared, dark and menacing. They came out of nowhere, as if they’d just materialized out of the ground. Like phantoms.

“They’re natural warriors, these creatures, every single one of the sons of bitches,” Josh spat.

The two creatures stood to their full height and Kacy gasped. They were monstrous, about eight feet tall, so big that they towered over the drilling crew. Heavily muscled, their bodies looked similar to some of the artist’s impressions of prehistoric velociraptors. They differed in two important characteristics. The first was their heads, which were flatter, with powerful jaws and eyes set more forward on the face, more like humans. The second was that unlike the velociraptors, they were vastly more intelligent. And they were anything but extinct. They didn’t hesitate, they were so fast. They just rushed in for the attack. Although they carried sidearms, they only used their claw-like hands to slash at the crew. Three of the men attempted to draw their pistols, but the Taurons smashed them to the ground with quick, machine-like efficiency. Two of the drillers managed to get off shots, but their laser pistols were clearly not powerful enough to penetrate the scaly, armored skin. The Taurons staggered as the shots hit them, but kept on coming forward. The clawed hands reached out to drag the last two men to the ground, and then the clip ended.

“Oh my God,” Kacy breathed. “They’re huge.”

“Jesus Christ!” Rahm breathed. “I’ve never seen anything like that. What about the rest of it? What happened next?”

“Nothing very pleasant, they sure wouldn’t want you to know about the next bit. The company makes sure that the goriest parts are erased.”

“But you know, don’t you?”

Josh nodded. “Yeah, I do, I’ve seen it happen.”

“What do you know, Mr. DeVries?” Tobin Ryles asked as he walked into the room.

Josh reached forward to clear the screen, but not before Ryles saw what was on it. The man’s face darkened.

“I thought that particular clip was restricted to management only. How did you find it?”

“Must have been an accident,” Josh mumbled. “We were looking for something else.”

“I see. Would you let me have the terminal for a moment, please?”

He sat at the screen and furiously keyed in a series of commands. The ‘Mars Miscellaneous’ clip disappeared. He stood up and looked at them, his face set in a taut smile. A smile that was more of a sneer.

“If you need to know anything about Taurons, you can ask me or Jacques Fechter. Don’t listen to gossip from some of the old ‘Mars hands’ they think they know it all. But they don’t, the Tauron threat has been neutralized. All you need to do is get down on the planet, mine the trevanium and go home in two years time with lots of money in your bank accounts. Josh, would you come with me, I need to have a word with you.”

They left the library, and two new arrivals brushed past them in the doorway and entered the library. A man and a woman, the man of about his age, and the woman a little younger. But what a woman! She took his breath away, as she was so beautiful, so totally out of place on this ship, rubbing shoulders with the tough Mars drilling crews. Her beauty was not something she’d constructed in front of a mirror. She had a natural, glowing, outdoor beauty. He watched her walk, when she moved. It was the delicate grace of a ballet dancer. Dark haired and dark eyed, her skin was a contrast, smooth and ethereal. He swallowed, she reminded him of Christine, his fiancée. The girl he’d failed in Afghanistan, the girl who’d died when he froze. The guy greeted him and Josh.

“I’m Grant Merkel, crew boss, this is Gabi Aaronsen. You’re crew bosses, aren’t you?”

Josh and Rahm nodded.

“Yeah, I thought I’d find you here. By the way, Gabi is on my crew, she’s a trainee technician. Despite the different surname, she’s also my sister, so be warned. Big brother always looks after her.”

They smiled. Gabi shook hands with them and Rahm warmed to the friendly pair. But he was wary with the girl. She was an unwelcome reminder of something he was working hard to bury in the deepest recesses of his mind. A different surname, did that mean she was married? She seemed to read his mind.

“Mom remarried after her first husband died, it was shortly after Grant was born. Technically he’s my half-brother, but I can tell you he’s always looked after me. I couldn’t wish for a better brother.” She smiled at him. “What were you guys looking at?”

“A clip about the Taurons,” Kacy replied. “But Tobin Ryles, the assistant base manager, came in and wiped it.”

Gabi laughed, it was a sound that was light, with a musical ring.

“Who’s afraid of the big bad Taurons, is that it? That’s silly, aren't they’re supposed to have them under control on Mars. They said they’re corralled on the opposite half of the planet from where we’ll be working. Why should we be worried about them?”

Rahm thought about the huge, bloodthirsty, slavering creatures he’d seen on the video clip.

“I’m not sure they’re entirely corralled, so we need to be pretty careful when we land.”

To his dismay he realized that even after such a brief meeting he didn’t want anything bad to happen to this pretty and lively girl. Not after the last disaster. Deep inside, he was thinking, ‘stay away from me, Gabi Aaronsen. I can’t protect you. I can’t look after my own people. They wind up dead’. But he couldn’t say what he felt, for he could only look at her pretty face and slim figure, until he forced his head away. She was full of optimism for her new career, and he looked back when he heard her talking.

“We’ll be ok, I’ll bet the company takes care of all those monster things, we won’t need to worry about them.”

Was she trying to reassure him, did she think he was scared? Or was he just too sensitive? He heard her talking again.

“They said all we need to do is drill down and extract the trevanium, and then we’ll come home rich. End of story. That’s what Grant wants, what I want. Isn’t it what you’re going for?”

How could he tell her he was going to Mars for a different reason? Sure, he wanted the fat pay packet. He had dreams of buying a good piece of land where he could lose himself, and hide himself away from the accusing faces. He would set up his own drilling consultancy business if there was enough money. But it wasn’t the reason he was going. First, he had to forget. To be as far away from the horror and the fear that still haunted his dreams. In the most challenging mining environment known to man, with work that was long and hard, he wouldn’t have time to think about the past. The Earth, with its ugly memories, would recede into the distance, more than a twenty million miles in the distance. Would it be enough to snap the threads that still held his soul to the terrible events of the past? He thought of the Tauron monsters he’d seen on that clip. Yes, maybe it would, there were plenty of problems to concern him, enough danger to occupy his mind. He nodded curtly to Gabi and said, “I’m sure you’re right, most of us are going there for the money.”

He knew hadn’t been convincing. He felt their eyes on him as he walked out.

He spent the following weeks furiously attacking the ship’s gym. For most of them, the daily sessions were a necessity, a way to stop their muscles from suffering the inevitable atrophy of weightlessness, or low-gravity space travel. For him, it was a catharsis. Day by day, the Earth receded further in the wake of the ship. He worked harder than ever, became an almost continuous occupant of the exercise room. His crew discovered that if they wanted to speak to him, they needed to go there. It became a joke, more than once he'd heard them call it, ‘Rahm’s Office’. He could live with that, as long as he left the Earth and its nightmarish reminders far in behind the hurtling ship. He had a frequent companion in the gym. Brad Haakon was a huge, tough, former marine. Something of a twin for Saul Packer, but the similarity ended there. Where Saul was clever and resourceful, Brad was a blunt instrument. A weapon that Rahm was thankful to have on his crew, given the size of the aliens. Life for Brad held no uncertainties. Women were a legitimate target, men were divided between friends and enemies, and there was nothing in between. If they weren’t friends, you punched or shot them. He’d already familiarized himself with the laser cannon, using the simulator to become expert at shooting targets as they presented themselves on the screen. The laser cannon was the heavy weapon that most Mars buggies carried high on their frames. The company had insisted that the cannon was merely a precaution. ‘You won’t meet any hostiles, because we’ve taken care of that problem. We just like to cover all the bases.’ When Brad wasn’t keeping fit and working his way around the limited females aboard the ship, with some success and some notable failures, he spent his time on the laser cannon. Each day, he went to the ship’s hold and stripped it, made sure that he was familiar with every part of the weapon. Then he re-assembled it and went through the target simulation program again. It was better than a normal computer simulation, he insisted. Almost as good as the real thing. But Brad had no expectations of him, he was a driller, Rahm was the boss. That was his situation and he was content with his lot. Kaz was another member of his crew, but he was a different kind of person. Rahm came upon him unexpectedly in the early hours of the artificial morning. He had a small mat spread upon the floor of the gym.