Semper Mars. Ian Douglas
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grown up in, that blacks and women had to work extra hard, had to go that extra kilometer, just to prove that they really had what it took.
James Lloyd had been taking that extra kilometer for a long time, now. Hard work and a no-nonsense attitude had led to his graduation cum laude from the University of Michigan, followed by both OCS and Marine Aviation Flight School. He’d flown a Harrier IV in Cuba in ’24, led a platoon by airdrop into Colombia in ’27, and seen combat since in Panama, Greece, and Andhra Pradesh.
While the fact that he was black had helped define his career, he rarely thought about it now. The Marine DI who’d run his OCS class had been black; an oft-quoted motivational expression of his was an old Corps theme: “There are no black Marines. There are no white Marines. There are only amphibious green Marines…and right now I want to see nothing but amphibious green blurs!…”
Colonel Lloyd thought of himself as amphibious green.
“Our original mission profile,” he told them as the noise died away, “called for off-loading to a Mars Shuttle-Lander, followed by a descent to the primary base at Candor Chasma. Those of you who’ve read your mission profiles—maybe I should say those of you who can read—know that Candor Chasma is on the Martian equator…about five thousand kilometers from Cydonia, which is where we’re ultimately supposed to be deployed.
“A new set of orders has come through from Earth, however. The MSL pilot has been ordered to take us directly to Cydonia. The bulk of our supplies and matériel will be sent to Candor Base, as originally planned. We will take with us what we can ferry along in the one MSL.”
“Aw, shit, Colonel!”
Lloyd turned a hard gaze on the Marine who’d spoken. “You have a problem with that, Corporal Slidell?”
“Sorry, sir…but damn it, what about all our supplies and shit?”
“There is no effective difference in the new deployment,” Lloyd said patiently, “at least insofar as our equipment is concerned. We would have had to off-load our gear at Candor, then repack what we needed to carry along aboard another MSL and redeploy by suborbital hop to Cydonia. As we needed spares or whatever, they would have been sent to us on the regular supply runs. We’re just cutting out one extra hop for us.” He studied Slidell’s stricken face, wondering what was going through the man’s head. “Be happy, Slider. The lot of you would’ve spent a day or two unloading shipping containers at Candor. Instead, you all get to sit on your fat, happy asses, guarding sand dunes at Cydonia.”
“Yeah, but it ain’t fair, jerkin’ us around like that,” Slidell said.
“Easy, man,” Lance Corporal Ben Fulbert told Slidell. “Ice down.”
“The Corps never promised you fair, Slider.” Lloyd decided that he would have to keep an eye on the man. He seemed just a little too upset by the change in plans.
“Why the change, Colonel?” Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky wanted to know. “I thought everything had to channel through Mars Prime.”
“When they tell me, Ostrowsky, I’ll tell you. In the meantime, we follow orders.” He hesitated before adding, “Let’s just say that HQ is concerned about the friendliness of our reception. So we go in sharp, and we go in with Class-Ones. Questions?”
There were plenty of questions—there had to be with this crowd—but no one spoke up. Hell, he had questions, and none of them could be answered yet.
The change had come through only a few hours before, coded, and marked Secret and Eyes Only. INTEL BELIEVES UNFMC TROOPS SHIFTED TO MARS PRIME REGION LAST 72 HOURS, the report had stated. The United Nations Force, Mars Contingent, numbered fifty men, almost twice the number in Lloyd’s Marine platoon. If they’d shifted south from Cydonia to the Mars Prime base at Candor Chasma, it could be because they planned to confront the Marines when they landed.
Or possibly not. Bergerac, the UNF’s new CO, was aboard the Polyakov. Maybe they were just getting ready to throw him a welcome-to-Mars party.
But Lloyd firmly believed that a little healthy paranoia was good for a man…and especially for Marines who planned to die in bed. That was why he’d ordered the platoon to assemble here in full armor, complete with weapons, HUD helmets, and full field gear. It made the storm cellar a bit crowded, and the deorbit was gonna be hell, but at least they would be ready, no matter what was waiting for them on the ground.
“Okay, people,” he said at last. “We got thirty mikes before the shuttle docks. Time for weapons drill.” He looked at his wrist-top, which had been attached to the outer sleeve of his gauntlet. “Ready…begin!”
Half an hour later, on schedule as dictated by the dead hand of Sir Isaac Newton, the first of a small fleet of approaching Mars Shuttle-Landers docked with Polyakov’s nonrotating hub. Though there were no windows in the storm cellar, there was a small television monitor with a feed from the control deck, and Lloyd was able to open a channel from one of Polyakov’s docking-bay approach cameras.
Harper’s Bizarre—painted in grit-scoured red letters on the stubby craft’s bare-metal prow—was the unofficial name of the first of the MSLs that slowly eased in to a capture and hard dock. The upper half of the forty-meter craft was a biconic hull, an off-center cone designed for atmospheric reentries, while the lower half consisted of two, stacked doughnut-clusters of spherical methane tanks and the close-folded complexity of a trio of spidery landing legs. The Bizarre, like the other MSLs on Mars, was a nuke, using a Westinghouse-Lockheed NTR, a Nuclear Thermal Rocket similar to the old Nerva designs, to heat the tanked reaction mass. The propellant of choice was methane, a liquid produced in quantity on Mars from atmospheric CO2 and permafrost-melted water; the concept was known as NIMF, an unlikely acronym standing for Nuclear rocket using Indigenous Martian Fuel.
Once the green light showed for docking lock one, pressures were equalized and the MSL opened to Polyakov’s interior. As befitted one of the burgeoning Martian colony’s workhorses, the Bizarre had a large and utilitarian cargo section, which for this trip had been fitted with a plug-in deck-chair module. Nothing fancy, but it had padding and straps enough to get human cargo from the cycler’s orbit to the Martian surface in, if not comfort, then at least relative safety.
Lloyd’s path through the docking collar and forward pressure lock brought him to a point where he passed beneath the feet of the MSL’s pilot. “Marine Mars Expeditionary Force,” he rasped out. “Request permission to come aboard.”
“Granted, Colonel,” the pilot called back. She was a slender redhead in a trim, lightweight pressure suit. “Find yourselves seats and get strapped in.”
The rest of the Marines were already clambering in after him, muttering curses or sharp imprecations as their clumsy Class-Ones scraped or bumped against equipment, bulkheads, or the armor of other Marines. Class-One armor was almost as bulky as a full-fledged space suit, and with good reason. It was self-contained, pressurized, and—with a full-charged life-support pack and rebreather assembly—could keep a man alive in hard vacuum almost indefinitely…or at least until his food ran out.
All of the MMEF’s armor had active chameleonic surfaces—coatings of a specially formulated plastic that “remembered” incident light and was able to adapt its color and texture within minutes to match the surroundings. The only parts of the suits that did not sport this constantly shifting surface were the helmet visors—normally dark to block ultraviolet radiation—and the traditionally camouflaged helmet covers. Those last were something of an old Marine tradition, a holdover from the second half of the twentieth century. Marine aviators, though they’d worn flight suits and standard helmets when they’d gone aloft in their old Harrier IIs or F/A-18s or, later, in their F/A-22s and AV-32s—always wore the US Marines’ standard tan, brown, and green fabric helmet cover…not for camouflage, but to show solidarity with their fellow Marines on the ground. It was a tradition that went back at least as far as Vietnam, and probably farther; Marines took extraordinary pride in the close relationship between Marines in the mud and the Marine aviators flying close support.
Lloyd