The last time I'd ventured out onto the Martian surface, the skies had been quiet, and the omnipresent particulate haze had settled.
Now, great plumes of dust rose into the sky, I'd have suspected volcanic activity if Mars hadn't cooled well before life walked on land back on Earth. Still, there were distant flashes and a golden glow to the clouds, which I'd heard were how lighting manifested in the arid and dusty atmosphere here.
I sat in the front with several of the Patriots and a sleeping Florette who turned restlessly in her sleep, my own hopes for a cat nap dashed by the rocky journey. I could have switched off forcibly, but we were in hostile territory and that would be ill advised. Machina told me that measures had been taken to blind or mislead satellites that might track us, but I still took the odd glance above through the cams as if I could do anything but scream should a Rod-from-God come screaming down at us at several kilometers a second. Scratch that, even with my reflexes I wouldn't make a sound.
That did raise a question that had been lurking in the back of my troubled mind for a while now.
"Captain Graham, do you know anything about why the weather was so odd a while back? No wind, no dust. I take it that isn't normal."
He looked up at me from where he sat next to Florette. I'd caught him taking the odd longing glance at her face as she slept peacefully, cushioned by leaves, though he tried to disguise it between turning the pages of his ancient comic book. Someone had developed a crush. He didn't even mind the odd creepy crawly that climbed on him, even though I knew that Martians were often entomophobic since most settlements had hardly any to speak of. But then again, he'd been born on Earth and had been a captain in the Army, much like me.
"You're right, it isn't normal. I don't think it's too big of a problem however." He sighed and laid aside his comic, peering at the display like I had been a moment ago.
"And?" I prompted.
"It's a UN ship, one of those with the brains of a supe taped on. If you're asking why it's not a threat, the supe in question has the ability to control the weather. This is Mars, what's the worst he can do?"
I ignored the sinking feeling in my gut. Sometimes I wished the ghosts of my past would stop haunting me even if I fled from them as far as I could go. The timeline added up, Little Jupiter had been sentenced several months back, add in the preparation time for the procedure, the amassing of the UN flotilla for the next scheduled movement to Sedna.. Deja vu. Things were blending together. Somewhere in my gut I'd known the truth before I asked.
He was right. There wasn't enough air here, and the worst that could happen was just an exacerbation of the dust storms. Hell, a cataclysmic dust storm would help cover our tracks, but evidently whoever was in charge of the fleet had used him to quieten things down so they could look down better. It was a testament to the abuse the planet had taken that the skies were still heavy with soot and ash.
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Our convoy avoided the roads, though few lead to where we were going. Thermoptic camo provided some safety from prying eyes, but I hoped the clairvoyants had better things to do than scrutinize this patch of dirt, and if they did, I hoped Machina had us covered, he'd been nearly impossible to track when I was batting for the other side.
Of course, at the time this had all been more of an oopsie that USMA was trying to brush under the couch rather than something that could hold back the combined UN fleet, and who knows what assets the US had retasked to retain their wayward colony.
We were about three platoons worth of infantry, if we're talking just the baseline humans and cyborgs. Far harder hitting if you counted the robots and vehicles, especially the ones laden with the quiescent spawn of Chimera. Yeah, they'd called him a Class 2 pending reclassification, bump that up to a 4. Add it all up and this was a small army.
Frost and Beacon could do their job without leaving the transport, when the going got rough, patches of ice appeared that covered the rocks, melting in our wake so as to not leave too obvious a trail. Once again, I was concerned we had all our eggs in one basket, but Machina seemed like he knew how to keep the foxes at bay.
Every once in a while, the ground would rumble hard enough to be felt through the anemic shock dampener this thing came with. I hadn't felt this back in the base, it was built to resist orbital bombardment, with excellent shock absorbers of the kind you might see in research facilities that desperately needed to prevent any unexpected movement.
Artificial light overshadowed the lightning, colossal discharges of energy that spoke to engines meant for traversing endless space turning their power and fury to smiting those below. I hoped Jupiter up there wouldn't take his name too literally.
I was sorry for him. And me. I hadn't expected it to go that far, I thought he was due to be attached to a penal brigade for a deployment or two, not lobotomized into a servitor helpless at the whims of some dispassionate fleet AI. For all that Judge Xiao promised, I doubted that we could put Humpty Dumpty together again when his sentence ended. What's that saying about eggs and omelettes?
Maybe, if I had known, I'd have let him go free. Panama felt like a lifetime ago, I missed being bored at a desk. Excitement was quickly followed by death in my career.
I'd heard some of the details about how the Penitents were moving without being swatted off the face of the planet. Silt had built tunnels that would have had any Vietcong leader salivating, and anything that wasn't camouflaged actively was using them. I suspected many had collapsed in the onslaught that followed, taking who knows how many with them, or worse, leaving them trapped helplessly miles below ground.
Machina had also set loose thousands of drone swarms, big and small. Right now, they were taking the brunt of it, drawing the ire of the orbiting vessels. They were still showing some restraint, Turing answered to no one, but right now they'd held off from attacking nations that hadn't given them permission to torch their own settlements like USMA had. There were plenty of neutral colonies nearby, and they weren't glassed yet, which is a good thing since I strongly doubted that an evacuation was anywhere near complete.
Would the terrestrial US surrender their colonies on USMA? Not without a fight. The Patriots had plans, grand ones, and seemed to expect that they could hold up against the waves of ships and soldiers that would inevitably follow if they managed to wrest control. I'm sure the American appetite for colonial endeavors wasn't unlimited, USMA and Mars were far from the most important things the US owned outside Earth. They had to meet the Alpha Centauri quotas as much as any other nation, and they'd find a hostile reception if they decided to pull back all their forces to deal with this insurgency.
I hoped Chang wasn't as bloodyminded as he was said to be. It's not like popular opinion meant much to him, democracy in the US had long been a sham. Hey, at least it made election season much more bearable, since everyone knew it was a joke.
It was still too early to think about renormalizing ties and bringing an independent Martian colonial state built from USMA into the UN, but my bureaucrat mind still vaguely wondered at the forms that would need filling.
"We're approaching sensor coverage. Machina, you ready?" Raul turned to yell at Machina in the back, abruptly dropping his volume when Florette awoke with a start.
"We've deployed countermeasures minutes ago, Captain."
A distant explosion proved his point, an infowar drone had flown on ahead, drawing the attention of the base defenses. Tiny explosions followed by puffs of blackness in the sky suggested flak, while missile trails demonstrated more targeted anti-air at work.
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"Alpha team! Last call, we're on red light." The LEDs in the vehicle agreed.
"Bravo, I need you to switch to the eastern approach. Take the high ground, suppressive fire, you've got drones and Machina's shields, you'll be fine."
"Charlie, look lively. This is it."
The orders were vocalized more for our convenience than anything else. Ah, I was already nostalgic.
"BULWARK. Don't let me down." Raul stood up, helping a groggy Florette onto her feet and offering her a cup of extra strong coffee. She'd made the beans herself, they'd been heavenly.
"It's sink or swim Cap, and I don't know how to swim." Frost told him. Of course he didn't, motherfucker could freeze the waves.
We crowded into the airlock, and I put my warface on. Time slowed to a crawl even though I wasn't running hot, and the abrupt transition of the red LEDs to a far too calm green was followed by the howl of escaping air, and then we were out on the surface, finding the battle hadn't waited for us.
Explosions on Mars had less concussive force than back home, but someone had told this to the defenders of Installation 63, and they'd taken umbrage. The shields Machina had installed on our gigantic moving target shimmered, shrapnel and missiles caught in their invisible vice stalled before falling inert to the ground.
Ahead of us, outgassing wreckage of drone craft showed me that we were taking it easy, any human in the crossfire would have been red mist.
We ran, while Machina hovered, his suit lifting him several feet above the ground. I did a double-take when I saw he was bare-faced, but the stray round that glanced off yet another invisible barrier and then distressingly close to me showed that he was hardly unprepared.
It was far too quiet, barring the rumbling. Machina believed in having more drones than the enemy had bullets, and hundreds of them swarmed forth, firing their weapons at the desperate defenders. I stuck close to Frost and Florette, he was raising infant glaciers of ice out of thin air, providing extra insurance in case Machina flunked his task.
I stared at a USMA soldier frozen in ice, his emotions hidden behind the frosted visor. I'd hoped he'd died before it took him.
Beacon could fly, not just fart fire. Magma rained down from above, and fires spread where they had no business existing in such thin air. More charred corpses, not necessarily of his making.
USMA had dug in like an Alabama tick. The skeletal garrison had been reinforced with fresh-faced Offworlders, and more drones and emplaced defenses.
Someone ought to have told them why that was a bad idea when there was a hostile Technomancer on the prowl, but they found out firsthand when Machina got within range.
Autocannons and lasers that had been aiming for us turned a full 180 degrees to face bewildered soldiers, who had just a moment to process that their IFF had gone from Friend to Foe before being blown away.
It was madness, but also had an air of unreality to it, like a movie where the director had paid top dollar for the CGI but had left the sound design to his nephew who was good with Audacity. Still, this slaughter was largely one sided, and we took the exterior of the facility without a single human casualty on our side, at least not where I could see them.
Installation 63 had a wide perimeter wall that had been breached in multiple places, more drones pouring in to handle defenders in locations that weren't under the coverage of their remaining big guns. The turret of a tank did somersaults before planting itself barrel first before me. I raised a mental score card with a 10/10 on it before joining the others entering the breach, where the heavily damaged central building lay.
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"Have they offered to surrender?" Machina asked Raul over our shared net.
"Negative, War Machine. They're holding out for reinforcements."
"Fools. Why don't they just stand down?" I heard Florette spit, bitter resignation in her voice.
I wanted to ask her why the Patriots hadn't stood down, but refrained. Something made men and women die for their country with a smile on their face, and I understood that, even if the sentiment had been beaten out of me long ago. Flags were only good for toilet paper.
"Wait. Comms, they want to talk."
The face of a very flustered officer appeared in my HUD, I didn't use the lace to receive potentially dangerous comms, though after letting Machina have his way with mine, I was shutting the stable door after the horse had been rendered into glue.
"Patriots. This is Captain Andrew Wells, USSF 1364729. I demand that your men stand down, we're willing to blow this facility up before we let you have it." He declared. He'd been too busy to activate the filters that might let him pretend to be calm and composed.
"You'll find your explosives don't work anymore Captain. Why don't you just try and see for yourself?" Machina told him.
The man blanched, evidently far from eager to take up the bluff.
"You're insane! All of you Martian fucks! You take this place and they'll just glass all of us." I saw the hint of desperate tears in his eyes and a crack in his voice before a subordinate moved in the background and turned the filters on, leaving a calm and composed man waiting on us.
"That's our headache. Will you save the lives of you and your men?" Raul replied.
The man shook his head with finality but didn't cut the comms, then he seemed puzzled, unable to figure out why the feed wouldn't end. Machina, I presume.
"Natasha." Machina said.
Florette drew herself up, as if about to perform an onerous and odious task, yet a necessary one. In her cam feed, I could see a vein throbbing in her temple, and the creatures that dwelled on her scrambled over her face in agitation.
Captain Wells drew his sidearm, as if planning to shoot the camera. However, he paused, and raised a hand to his temple, slowly at first, before frantically tugging at what I first mistook for a hair, before it began to grow thicker and greener.
No, not hair: Stalks. Roots. Flowers. Leaves. The filter glitched, alternating from a staid view of a preoccupied officer to a window into a man who had grown a Crown of Thorns around his head, which was rapidly extending tendrils into his skull. For once, I was glad I couldn't hear the screaming.
The other USMA and US troops recoiled in horror, watching their CO writhe on the floor as orchids bloomed in his eye sockets. The same junior officer who had turned on the filters stepped forth with shaky legs, unmuting it again, turning the directional mic away from the worst of the screaming, before talking to us with a warbly voice.
"Please stop. Can you save him?" He begged. He was young, hardly out West Point. I didn't envy him his introduction to war.
"No. You'll be next if you don't surrender." Machina told him, looking at Florette who had blacked out her own camera, even if I could still hear her hyperventilating through the audio feed.
"We surrender. I'm sorry Captain." With shaking hands, the Lieutenant drew his own pistol and discharged it into his leader's head, yet the plants kept growing nonetheless.
I'm glad I don't throw up easy, even if I'd seen worse deaths.
With the facility now his plaything, Machina ordered the drones in first to restrain the survivors, who had discarded all their weaponry and had the fight taken out of them for good. I walked in when the body had been dragged out of sight, but for the blood and fallen leaves.
And then, as if Ares had awakened and decided that he wouldn't take this assault on his form lying down, the massive railgun that lay at the heart of Installation 63 opened its metal eye, blast iris shifting aside, and then returned the favor to Olympus.
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