Battleground Mars (6 page)

“They had weapons to defend themselves with, for Christ’s sake. They knew what they were doing.”

Rahm eyed him coldly. “How in hell do you defend yourself when you’re drilling a half mile into the Martian surface? It’s hard enough keeping the drill straight.”

Fechter shook his head. “It’s not my fault, I warned them it was dangerous, but they wouldn’t listen.” He made to leave, but Saul Packer blocked his way.

“We need to do something about the Taurons, Jacques. This could be the start of a new series of attacks, so we have to be able to defend ourselves a lot better than we have up until now. We can’t risk a repeat of last time.”

“Defend ourselves with what? You want me to send a battalion of militia out with every crew? Christ, this is a mining colony, I don’t have the men or the resources to do anything more than scrape by. You’ll all have to take a lot more care, that’s all. Make sure you always go armed and keep your eyes peeled while you’re working.”

“Peeled for what?” Saul spluttered. “You know as well as I do, those monsters are almost invisible, you don’t see them until they’re on you. We’re only lucky they’ve stayed away up till now.”

“What do you suggest, then, Packer? A miracle?” Fechter’s voice question was pitched almost as a sneering joke. But no one laughed.

“No,” he responded firmly. Fechter snorted and made to move past him, but Saul had the wide, muscled body of an Olympic weightlifter. “We need to wipe these bastards out, go after them and destroy them before they kill us all. You know that’s what they intend.”

“That’s crazy, Saul. We can’t start a war. We need to negotiate a way around this, that’s the professional way to do things.”

Rahm laughed. “Jacques, they already started a war. You know as well as I do that they won’t stop until we’re all dead or off the planet.”

“Or they’re all dead,” Rahm pointed out. “We should take the fight to them.”

“I think you’re all exaggerating the threat,” the manager fumed. “Look, I’ll talk to Damian Hacker and we’ll increase security, I can’t do any more than that. I’ll send out a squad with every team. But it’ll slow us down, and we’ll struggle to make the bonus at the end of the contract.”

He pushed past them and they let him go.

Rahm saw Kacy Lakkin moving towards them. The only female on his team, she was the technician responsible for keeping monitoring the drilling operation and maintaining their equipment. Even more importantly, she had the task of assaying the minerals they brought back, to check their purity and weight. Her figures were the basis of their bonuses. Fechter’s face fell, he was known to have kicked up a fuss when women were first recruited for the Mars Mining Corporation, but he’d backed down, albeit with bad grace. Kacy was the first female member of his team and had more knowledge of mining operations in her little finger than Jacques Fechter. She also had a lot more guts. On Earth she’d been a homicide detective. When her marriage broke up leaving her with a mountain of debts from a deadbeat husband, she’d been desperate to earn some big money. The Mars package came up, and she’d jumped at it. Kacy had become an indispensable asset to his team, hard working, always checking and re-checking every last part of her equipment. The crew said that she even had her tablet loaded with technical manuals for a little light bedtime reading. But she could also drink most of them under the table, and she was pretty. Those were huge assets in the eyes of his crew, especially Saul Packer. She looked angry.

“I don’t think they’re taking it seriously enough, Rahm. Those monsters will pick the crews off one by one if we don’t stop them, it’s like every one of them is a serial killer. I’ve dealt with them when I was a cop, but they were less than six feet tall and there wasn’t a colony full of them. One thing I do know, these alien sickos aren’t going to give up. They never do.”

He nodded. “You’re right. We can’t skulk around Mars Base like Fechter and Ryles. Besides, we need to be able to travel freely over our sector. The best of the trevanium has been worked out around here. I agree with Saul, we should kick their butts off the planet. Or bury them underneath it. But mounting a major assault on the Taurons is a bit more than we’re capable of right now. I could do with some suggestions.”

“The first thing we need is to find out what went down in the Nepenthe Valley. When we know, we can start to make plans.”

“I know what you’re saying. We need to recover the recorder.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. We need to look at the evidence, we have to go to the Nepenthe Valley and recover it.”

They talked long and hard over their options, but they were few. They all agreed that the first priority was to recover the recorder. It was dark when they went to see the manager. He was in his office, when he spoke, there was a distinct smell of alcohol that they tactfully ignored. Tobin Ryle was sat opposite, and they both looked startled when Rahm crashed open the door.

“Can’t you knock?” Fechter fumed. Rahm ignored him and moved aside to let Saul and Kacy enter the office.

“We’re taking a team out to recover the camera from Merkel’s site. We’ll need to take a buggy from the stores.”

“Now? No way. No one goes out at night. You should know that, it’s far too dangerous. Besides, I’m not going to authorize a buggy for a return to the Nepenthe Valley, you may as well drive straight to their Elysium base, knock on the door and hand yourselves in. Forget it.”

“The rest of the crews want us to do this too, Jacques. We need to retrieve that camera and find out what we’re up against, see if we can discover anything that will help us fight these bastards when they come gunning for us.”

Tobin Ryle jerked up, turned around and eyed Rahm. “You don’t need to discover anything, Rahm. We give you something to defend yourselves with, and I believe it’s still called a fucking gun. The manager said no, so that’s the end of it. Are you deaf, we’re trying to have a meeting here?”

Rahm looked down at him. Ryle was barely five feet five inches and he was six feet tall. The assistant base manager was the kind of guy who took the height difference badly. He would always be inclined to bear a grudge against someone taller than himself. In his case, that meant pretty much all men in the human race. The acne scars on his bitter, thin face did little to endear him to the people he endlessly sparred with. Rahm wondered if he had ever had a close relationship with anyone. Probably not. He shifted his attention back to Fechter, ignoring Ryles.

“Is that your last word, Jacques?”

The man nodded. “It is, yes.”

“I’ll tell them,” Rahm nodded and made to walk away. “Let us know if you change your mind, it would be good to be able to start the drilling again.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“The crews say that they want to see the recording and find out how Grant’s crew was ambushed, before they go out again. You can’t blame them. After all, we do need to know what we’re up against when we go out there again.”

Ryle jumped to his feet, bristling with anger. Rahm thought he looked somewhat like an outraged peacock, although less dangerous. His ravaged face was angrier than ever. “That’s horseshit, Rahm, and you know it. We’re well aware of what we’re up against; we know it’s the Taurons, same as always.”

“We?” Rahm arched an eyebrow and Tobin reddened and looked away.

“You know what I mean,” he muttered weakly.

Rahm made to walk out of the office, but Fechter called him back.

“Alright, take the buggy and get the recording. You’d better get going, because I want you back here ready to start the next shift.”

Rahm nodded. “I’ll tell the men.”

“Let me see that recording when you get back. And for Christ’s sake, keep your eyes open for Taurons. I don’t want to lose any more of my teams.”

Rahm walked out of the door and closed it behind him. Saul and Kacy were right behind him.

“Our manager has decided to see the light.”

They nodded. “I’ll get the buggy ready and the rest of the crew suited up and down to the garage,” Saul muttered.

“We’ll need heavier weapons for this trip, I’ll see to it,” Kacy added. Rahm nodded his thanks. They walked back to the canteen, and Saul peeled away to the garage. Kacy put a hand on his arm. “One thing I have to know. Did the crews really refuse to go out until they’d seen the recording?”

Rahm shook his head “I lied. With the management, it’s a question of knowing which button to push.”

Thirty minutes later they were rolling across the Martian landscape. The drilling teams operated with six men. Rahm drove, and Saul Packer and Kacy Lakkin shared the front of the buggy with him. In the back were the other members of his crew, Brad Haakon, Nathan Wenders and Kaz Yasan. As usual, Yasan was silent, so it was difficult to know what went on behind that inscrutable expression. Kaz was a Muslim, but it was only one of three religions he worshipped. The second was the pursuit of wealth, and he intended to leave Mars with a hefty bank balance. The third was fighting, and he allowed few of the Koran’s inhibitions about violence to stop him getting involved in a serious scrap. Perhaps he was a throwback to his Arab ancestors. With his swarthy face, Semitic hook-nose and dark, brooding eyes, he wouldn’t have been out of place leading a warrior band against the Crusaders that invaded the Holy Land in the twelfth century. He held a heavy laser rifle and kept darting glances around them, looking for something to use it on. Nathan Wenders looked nervous, licking his dry lips. Several times Rahm felt his gaze fixed on him. He didn’t think he’d done anything to upset him, and Nathan had never suggested anything like that. Maybe he was gay, so he’d have to disappoint him on that score. Brad Haakon was re-assembling the swivel mount for his beloved laser cannon. Doubtless he was bored with the endless target simulations and longed for something real to shoot at. In six months this was the first prospect of real action. Except that they were on Mars to mine the precious trevanium and go home, nothing more. Professional drillers, most of them were irritated at anything that interfered with the process of ripping the mineral from beneath the surface.

They drove for two hours until they began to near the Nepenthe Valley. Rahm swung the wheel over and began climbing into the Hadriaca Highlands.

“You’re going the wrong way,” Saul pointed out.

“I’m detouring to the higher ground, so that we can check out the valley for any sign of the enemy.”

“You’re treating this like one of our search and destroy missions in the Amazon basin,” he smiled. “We had some hairy missions, I recall.”

“They’re missions I’d sooner forget, Saul. I’m not proud of what we did in those days.”

“They attacked us first, if you remember. I was us or them.”

“Wouldn’t you have attacked if some huge corporation came in to your home, ripped up the land and poisoned the local rivers?”

“Well, yeah, but we were good at what we did.”

“You’re right, but we were damned good, too good, in fact. We became the company’s hired gunslingers, Saul, nothing more.”

Saul grunted and lapsed into silence. Rahm recalled their bloody, bruising battles with bands of hostile natives. Had be been trying to prove something to himself, after Christine was killed? No doubt a psychologist would say that he was. Thank God it was all in the past, Mars was a sure-fire way of concentrating your attention of other things. And perhaps, must maybe he’d find the answers to the dark nightmares that came to visit him in the night.

 
They climbed steeply uphill until Rahm stopped the vehicle on a plateau that overlooked the whole of the Nepenthe Valley. They climbed out and each focused their binoculars on the scene below. Grant Merkel’s buggy came into view, upturned and badly bent, otherwise it looked intact. Pieces of broken machinery littered the ground, and there was nothing undamaged in view. It was a scene of total desolation and destruction. Neither was there any sign of the aliens. The Taurons had departed. Rahm called over to Kaz.

“Your eyes are the best in the crew, Kaz. Take a good look around, what do you think?”

The Arab nodded. He seemed to look around for a second for somewhere to spit, for it was something he did before he concentrated on certain tasks. They presumed it was a cultural thing, for luck. But Kaz remembered in time that he had his helmet on, so he looked intently across the valley. After a few minutes he turned to face them.

“I can’t see anything, but they’re not far away, I can feel them. I’m sure they’re watching the site. It could be that they’re planning another ambush. We should drive straight in and straight out, that’s the only way to handle it, we need to move fast. We should keep the laser cannon manned, the lookouts as well. If Brad takes the gun, I’ll keep watch with Nathan.”

“We’re going in,” Rahm replied. “I’ll handle the buggy, and Kacy and Saul can recover the data drive with the recording on it. Let’s do it.”

He drove downhill fast, going fast across the Martian slope and then began the long, slow descent into the valley. There was still no movement, they reached the abandoned drilling site and he stopped the buggy. The crew climbed out fast and went to work. The Tauron regions of Mars were not places to explore at leisure. Brad kept traversing the heavy cannon while Kaz and Nathan mounted the top of the frame and used their binoculars to sweep the surrounding area. Kacy and Saul went to work retrieving the recording while Rahm looked around for any possibility of survivors. It was a forlorn hope, for the alien monsters didn’t leave corpses behind, they had other, grisly, priorities. He looked around to make certain that his crew was keeping a good watch, but he needn’t have worried. They were all professionals, experts in the dirty and dangerous work of mineral exploitation in the hardest and cruelest of environments. The silence was oppressive. Normally, they worked close to other teams and the constant radio chatter, the scream of the drills as they drove further and further into the ground were constant companions. But now there was nothing. It was the silence of death. He made a check of the buggy’s power reserve, there was more than enough remaining for the return journey, even if they needed to drive at full speed all the way. That thought made him look around again for any signs of the aliens, but the horizon was clear. Even so, he couldn’t rid himself of an ominous feeling. He went to speak to Kacy and Saul.