Mars Fire - Chapter XVI - Sol 4
Serialized science fiction
Previous Chapters: Chapter I , Chapter II , Chapter III , Chapter IV , Chapter V , Chapter VI , Chapter VII , Chapter VIII , Chapter IX , Chapter X , Chapter XI , Chapter XII , Chapter XIII , Chapter XIV , Chapter XV
Chapter XVI - Sol 4 - Thursday
The dash across the northern perimeter of Delman Drift only took about twenty minutes, after which they reached solid sand again. Dixon had sweat dripping down the sides of his neck from the stress, and when Nicholson’s rover ahead of them finally stopped kicking up the blackish dust - signalling the end of the drift - he let out an explosive sigh of relief, shaking his head at the same time.
“Let’s not do that again. I vote we take a different route home.”
“You know it. I’m going to kit up so long.” Burrows unbuckled his seat restraint and motioned for Ian to follow him. “Let’s get ready for this mess.”
Trotting to the rear of the cabin, where the equipment lockers were clustered around the airlock, the first thing that Burrows pulled out from one of the drawers was a roll of khaki-brown tape. Ian, right behind him, deftly caught it once Burrows lobbed it at him.
“Your Euro suit is too white and too obvious here. If you get seen on camera, the Union will immediately open a profile on you and start digging up your past.” Burrows indicated the flags on Ian’s shoulders. “Start by covering those, and then cover as much of the rest of the suit as you can without messing up your sensors.”
“Is there not a spare suit available?” Ian asked, but Burrows was already shaking his head.
“Not here, no. We have extras back at Home One, but we still need to size and fit you, and it takes a few days. We can sort that out once we get back. We didn’t really expect issues on this trip.”
Next was the combat webbing, which Burrows spread out on the galley table. There were two sets, made from a synthetic nylon-like compound, and coloured in the same khakis and sand colours that whorled along the outside of the rover. Each set was a simple belt-and-braces arrangement, which could easily be slipped over an existing suit while keeping the weight distribution to the shoulders and waist. Blocky ammo pouches clustered along the hips of each belt set.
Finally came the flak vests, of which Burrows immediately slipped one on. The vests were the same camouflage pattern as the webbing, and were covered in horizontal lines of cord for clipping extra accessories to the outside. The buckles were also fat, bulky things, clearly designed for operating while wearing gloves. Each set looked like two oversized aprons, covering the front and rear of his body, and once he had buckled the set on he began to layer one of the webbing sets in place over it.
“This is a kevlar-ceramic hybrid mix, from our friends in the west.” Burrows used his knuckles to rap against the front of the flak vest, and a dull clonking sound echoed through the cabin. “It stops most rounds that the Union foot soldiers use, and it reduces spalling as well. The low gravity here means that the bullet impact will still knock you flat on your ass though. So when you get hit, prepare yourself for a hard landing.”
Ian, still busy tearing off lines of tape to mask his suit, looked up as Burrows demonstrated how the clasps on the vest and the webbing set worked.
“I haven’t had the proper gun training yet,” he began, but Burrows waved him off.
“I know, and that’s why you’re staying inside the rover for this one. I need you disguised and protected in case there is an emergency - hence the armour - but the main plan is to keep you hidden for now.” Burrows lifted the second flak vest and helped Ian slip into it once he was done with the tape roll. “Otherwise you might end up doing or saying the wrong thing out there, and then anything is possible.”
“I really wasn’t expecting this type of action this soon after coming here.” Ian struggled with the buckles on the one side of the vest while Burrows deftly clipped up the other side. “I thought I’d have to work with the fish for a while first before you guys allowed me out here.”
“What’s the quickest way to learn how to swim?” Burrows raised an eyebrow with the question, and Ian gave a rueful laugh in return. “You’ll be fine. Just use your head and follow our lead.”
The next layer of protection was something decidedly less advanced, and Burrows had to grin widely when he saw Ian’s confusion at the next box that he opened and placed on the table.
“Face paint. There’s a long explanation here, but the short one is simple: if the Union records your face…”
“...then they know who I am,” Ian finished. The box held an assortment of small pots and handheld mirrors, and Burrows opened two of the pots to reveal black and dark brown creamy pastes inside.
“The Union facial recognition tech works on identifying key points on your face, so we apply paint on those points and distort their data as much as we can.” Burrows applied some of the black paste to his nose, cheekbones and chin, and began to vigorously rub it over his skin as he continued talking. “We used to just polarise our visors when we dealt with them, but a few years ago they found a way to scan through the polarising effect and capture faces regardless, so we had to get clever after that.”
“I’m guessing it works though, right?” Ian pulled his gloves off and began to apply some of the black paste to his face.
“Oh yes, and they were quite mad about it too. There was even a news report about it on their networks, about barbarians who make themselves look like corpses ‘in order to scare people and create social disorder’ up here in the colonies. They tried to hit us with the whole ‘social disapproval’ thing, which is a massive part of Union culture, but doesn’t really have traction in the Liberty Zones.” Burrows finished with the black paste and reached for the brown, which he started applying to the remaining skin on his face and neck. “Whenever we meet one of them up here and they ask about the paint, we just tell them that we’re dirty from working on things. No-one can really argue with that and expect to win.”
Ian soon looked like some ghoul-faced Halloween creature as he finished with the black paint - a look that Burrows knew he himself shared - and while he began on his brown paint, Burrows began checking the carbines in the gun rack. They had four carbines in the rover - a personal rifle for himself and Dixon, plus two spares - and he went over each of them in turn, making sure that the barrel was clear, that the action worked, that the dust-plug responded correctly to the trigger pulls, and that each of them was cycling correctly. The ejected rounds made muted tinkling sounds as they popped out and tumbled to the cabin’s floor with every test cycle.
Ian, having finished his second layer of paint, stooped to pick up one of the rounds and study it.
“Standard Martian 5mm, nothing fancy.” Burrows caught the next round that popped out of the last carbine he was busy checking, and held it up to the light. It was about as long as his smallest finger, with a copper casing, a moderate neck profile, and a black tip. The primer at the back was a neon green dot that seemed to glow under the cabin lights. “It gets the job done up here, and it’s easy to fabricate with a basic shop. I’ll show you our ammo line when we get back to Home One.”
“I was just wondering about that. We - I mean the Euro colony - went over to a caseless design a few years ago.” Ian studied the base of the cartridge before handing it back to Burrows. “They say it gets the same range on only two-thirds of the weight.”
“Yeah it’s nice when you have lots of money to throw at these types of problems.” Burrows snorted as he clicked the rounds back into the magazines. “We just have cheap copper and too much sulphur up here, so we make do with this stuff. You get a five kilometre range with these, and the recoil isn’t too bad. Not that we usually shoot at those distances, but it’s nice to have the option.”
“Five kilometres?” Ian seemed surprised by the number. “For something that small?”
“We have less than forty percent gravity here, remember?” Burrows returned the last magazine to its pouch, feeling it lock in place at the bottom. “Ballistic drop up here is two inches at a thousand metres, where the same round on Earth would drop six to seven inches. You can do some crazy trick shots up here on a day when the wind decides to cooperate.”
The thought seemed to intrigue Ian, and Burrows left him to go check on Dixon. It was good that the new kid was at least asking questions and thinking about these things - a lot of people came to Mars with Earth assumptions hardwired into them, and then had a really bad time the first time they had to deal with a naked, raw Mars where the Earth rules did not apply.
“Looks like we’re about twenty minutes out.” Dixon was driving with a little more ease at this point, and the command console around him had a multitude of maps and metrics that were ticking along as they travelled. “No update yet from Nicholson on what we’re going to find.”
Burrows checked the clock. It was just after five in the afternoon, and the sun was busy sliding towards the horizon somewhere to their right. The shadows were starting to lengthen around them, drawing black fingers across the sand, and the area they were in - fewer dunes, more rocky ridges, and the occasional mesa of blue-black rock - reminded Burrows of the Stumpwood area they had passed through the day before. Some vast force, in aeons past, had carved the land here with hands of water and ice, and left a scene of desolate beauty that was both unique and, at the same time, the same as so many other untouched areas on the red planet.
A red planet that they were trying to tame, while it fought back.
* * * * *
Twenty minutes later, their convoy nosed out of a valley flanked by wind-smoothed, tumbled round boulders, and they got their first sight of the confrontation that had started so many hours before. The valley they exitted ran almost straight west to east, and opened onto a dune sea where the sand and dust seemed to have fought back against the ridges and exposed bones of the planet. To the north and east, dunes marched off to the horizon, while to the south lay a gap-toothed series of mesas and jagged rock. The Cora Springs mining claim was in the basin where the dune sea terminated against the valley mouth, protected from the wind by the mesa line, and Burrows immediately understood why the prospecting team had tried the area. Protection from the wind meant that any of the fermium pearls in the area here would have been protected by the accumulated sand layers - and with the raw rock plates so close to the surface, any effort to dig down or plough the sand back, to prospect for pearls, would have delivered near-instant results.
It was a good bed, by all indications, and there were a number of temporary structures placed along the valley’s mouth, anchored to the rocky floor there. Squat mining containers, of a similar design to the haul they had escorted from Alvie Ranch the day before, made up most of them, and the yellow Cora Springs logo - a water spring spraying up from what looked like an oil barrel, on a circular black background - was visible everywhere. Buggies with mining ploughs were parked near the edge of the sandy fields, and there were already deep scrape marks throughout the basin where tentative work had started. Marker poles, in various colours and lengths, marked out different areas on the field where the prospectors must have set up some type of grid for their operations.
The Union crawler was a giant blue maggot that squatted in the midst of it all.
It was a vast machine, with multiple hull segments joined by articulated ribbing, and numerous wheels held each segment off the ground. The head was a bloated, raised affair that appeared to span at least two deck levels - based on the number of cockpit windows lining the front and sides - and a veritable forest of sensor masts, antennae, satellite dishes and other transmission systems ran from the top of the head and down the spine of the first segment. Each segment behind that had a crane mounted along the spine, and a variety of claws, buckets, scoops, and drag-line attachments were visible. The three tail segments were all reinforced cargo flatbeds, with what appeared to be bulk ore containers filling them. The crawler looked very capable of operating and mining on its own for quite some time.
“That’s a big boy,” Dixon whistled in appreciation as they drew closer, and the size of the crawler became evident. “We haven’t seen one of those in a while.”
“Last I heard, they were all up on the Seven Craters border, trying to get into Argos.” Burrows, at the drone station, used the hull cameras to scan and record various points on the crawler as they drew closer. “They must have detoured south to get all the way here.”
“Or it’s a new one.” Dixon pointed at the name painted on the side of the crawler’s hull. Hanzi calligraphy at least a metre tall covered the gleaming blue hull in red strokes, with the name Glorious Leader written in smaller Latin lettering below it. “We’ll need to check that name against the databases.”
“I’m scanning and recording as we go.” Burrows grabbed shots of the cockpit area, the forest of transmission equipment, the wheels, the segmented bulging between the hull compartments - anything that the CDM intel teams could find useful. A part of him winced at the idea that those same recordings would inevitably end up leaking back to the Union, along with their analysis of it - but that was outside of his control for now.
Blocking the crawler, and looking tiny in comparison, were a scattering of small buggies, which the Cora teams must have used to move around the site before. Two of the buggies were parked crossways directly in front of the Union crawler, preventing it from proceeding, and two more had boxed in its tail as well to prevent it from rolling back. Suited figures - some in white, others in khaki or green - milled around each buggy, facing off against a number of blue-suited figures which Burrows immediately recognised as Union personnel. Their sapphire-hued suits were impossible to mistake for anything else, and they were never seen in any other colours. Only their bandit infiltrators in the Liberty Zones used different suits, and eschewed blue for the obvious reasons.
Nicholson’s rover pulled to a halt at the edge of the field, and waited there for a few moments as the two Home One rovers also pulled in behind it. Burrows sent a simple status ping across to the utility rover, and received a Ready Ready ping back almost instantaneously. Reyn and Pope were geared up and prepared for whatever came next.
“Cora-1 this is Exeter-66. What’s your play?” Dixon’s voice was calm as ever.
“Sit tight. I’m checking in with my people.” Nicholson’s voice was heavily distorted on the channel, and Burrows winced as it peaked into a ghastly shriek at the end.
“Jammers. I was expecting this. Switch to the laser net.” Burrows, still at the drone station, watched Dixon nod and tap out more commands on his console. Somewhere on the outside of the CDM rover’s hull, Burrows knew that one of the laser-equipped cameras was now pointing at a matching spot on Nicholson’s rover, ready to transmit with light where radio waves were failing against the Union jamming.
“Cora-1, we’re switching to the laser net. Standard hostile protocol.”
“Copy that. Standby.” The distortion was gone, and Burrows could almost hear the strain in Nicholson’s voice this time.
“Go get kitted up. I’ll take over.” Burrows tapped Dixon on the shoulder, and the other man swiftly slid out of the driver seat and headed to the rear. The seat creaked when Burrows dropped into it, and he had his hands on the control levers before he belatedly realised that his gloves were still clipped to his belt. Tugging them on took little time, and he had just finished when there was a response from Nicholson.
“We’re moving up. Box in the head on the far side. We dismount and talk face to face with their leader once we’re there.” The other rover lurched into motion even as Nicholson was talking, and Burrows sent their own vehicle gliding after it. The utility rover fell in behind them, dust-streaked white contrasting sharply with the camouflage on the militia vehicles.
The final distance to the Union crawler took only a minute or two, and once Burrows pulled into the shadow of its head, the sheer size of the vehicle became all the more apparent. This close he could see in - at an upwards angle, admittedly - through the cockpit windows that stretched across the bulkheads above him, and there were several shapes standing and moving around inside the crawler, clearly very aware of their approach. The crawler’s sheer size made the Alvie Ranch mining haulers look like toys in comparison.
Burrows pulled the rover to a halt, and began to tap away at the screen containing the vehicle’s security systems. He beckoned Ian closer with his other hand.
“We’re going to step out now, and deal with these people. You’re staying inside, and when I send the signal - and only when I send the signal - you will flick this switch.” Burrows indicated a toggle switch on the side of the console, protected under a black cover. He took an unmarked arming key from one of the bulkhead lockers next to the seat, and inserted it into a keyhole next to the toggle switch, before turning it in a full circle. There was a noticeable lack of wear and tear around the toggle switch, showing how rarely anyone touched that area. “You will strap yourself into this seat until I tell you otherwise, and you will not flick that switch unless you are strapped in. Clear?”
“Clear.” Ian swallowed hard. “What does the switch do?”
“Two things. It ejects you from the cockpit, and then it fires every weapon system we have at the Union crawler.” Burrows finished the last setup on the control panel, and stood up. “We don’t want to use that option, because we will all probably die - but we need to be prepared for it just in case.”
Ian exhaled softly as he lowered himself into the seat. Burrows noticed the tremor in his hands as he buckled himself in.
“You’ll probably also need your helmet before you do that, though. Let me fix that.” Burrows headed to the airlock, where a black-faced Dixon was buckling on the last of his equipment, and scooped up Ian’s helmet from the rack before returning to the driving seat and helping the younger man don it.
“Wait! What is the signal?” Ian jerked back as Burrows made to move off. “And what about the radio interference?”
Burrows took a deep breath and forced himself to smile as he looked back.
“It’s dead simple. If anyone starts shooting - that’s your signal.”
Next chapter: TBC
