The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds (45 page)

“But back then, we positioned these bases assuming we
had satellites and were running regular air patrols,” she
criticizes.

“Being out in the middle of Coprates—keeping between
the ranges—might keep him out of sight of the ETE as well,” I
calculate. One more call I have to make.

“It could be more than just being able to jump us,”
she thinks it further. “It may also be about better real
estate—especially if he’s not afraid of the locals. And didn’t the
Stilsons say something about a PK colony out that way?”

“Eureka,” I remember.

Lisa’s Operations Officer—Lieutenant Petersen—lets us
know we’ve got incoming from Richards.

“Message received.”

And that’s it.

“He doesn’t want to risk Chang hearing us,” I
decide.

“It’d be nice to know what he has in mind,” Lisa
grouses.

“Looks like we have to trust,” I try to sound
optimistic.

I call Mark Stilson back and tell him what we’ve
calculated. Like Richards, he’s vague about his response, just
thanks us for the intel.

I decide to stick around for awhile, and Lisa puts us
up in a spare pilot’s quarters. Melas Three is even more
submarine-like than Melas Two. The “room” is five-by-eight, most of
that taken up by a stack of narrow bunks. At least it has an
attached bathroom (though it’s barely big enough to sit down in
without banging your knees). The rolled-steel walls echo, adding to
the ship-at-sea effect.

Sakina and I manage to make do wedged into the bottom
bunk. Our intimacy has become more and more urgent lately,
desperate, as if we both fear time may be short. It would almost be
romantic if the danger wasn’t looming so oppressively. And I
realize I’ve chosen to spend the night because I don’t want my
men—or Lisa—hung out this vulnerable if I’m not at least willing to
share their exposure.

28 December, 2116:

Anton and his team cobble together a half-dozen small
sensor stations to plant on high ground. A morning’s run with our
last ASV gets them planted up on the Catena Divide and on the
mountains southeast of Melas Two. They also help with signal
strength back and forth between our bases.

Feeling like we’ve at least got some kind of early
warning system, I take the return flight back to Melas Two.

“Spectators,” Smith points out as we’re headed over
the mountains. Two ETE ships are hovering west of us, just within
visual range, as if running their own patrols of the passage
between Coprates and Melas.

“We could use the…” I start to say. And then the ship
gets rattled by a massive shockwave. There’s a deafening sound of
thunder. Ahead of us, the sky is filled by a geyser of dirt and
rock, shooting hundreds of feet upward, at least a hundred feet
wide.

“What the hell…?” Smith tries, quickly turning our
nose away from the apparent blast.

“Missile?” I guess. But it didn’t sound like a
warhead. Sakina stares through the plexi at all the flying dirt,
frozen.

“One of our sensors was in there somewhere,” Smith
confirms the loss. Then: “Incoming. Friendlies.”

The ETE ships are moving in.

“Colonel Ram to ETE flights. We are intact. You might
want to back away until we can determine what just happened,” I try
to warn them off.

I hear something that sounds easily supersonic
cutting the air, followed by another thunderclap, only nowhere near
as loud as the last one.

“Behind us!” Smith locates, turning the ship to give
us a look. A similar blast plume has been thrown up out of the
Catena Divide.

“It looks like a meteorite strike,” Anton comes over
the Link.

“We lost another sensor,” Smith confirms.

“Get us out of here,” I order Smith. “Get low.”

“You need to see this, Colonel…” Anton sends me
videos of the first blast: one from a distance that must have been
from the Catena cameras, and another much closer—marked as our ASV
nose cam. The mountaintop erupts—like demolition, or a caldera
explosion. He rolls it back, slows it way down, highlights: I can
see something fly in very fast, visibly rippling the air as it
passed, impacting the mountainside with unbelievable kinetic
energy. Like a meteorite. Only the trajectory is horizontal.

Video of the second hit looks very similar. MAI runs
some quick calculations of the projectiles’ speeds and
trajectories. Speed for both was pushing Mach 10. The trajectories
are amazingly flat, and coming from somewhere east in Coprates.

“I’m not reading propellant in the trail,” Rick comes
on. “And the blast doesn’t look like a chemical explosive. It
doesn’t look like an explosive at all. Captain Smith called it: it
looks like a meteorite strike, all kinetic energy.”

Smith is burning fuel hard, circling us around the
western tip of the mountains, putting them between us and
whatever’s in Coprates that’s capable of throwing Mach 10
projectiles.

“ETE ships, you need to back out and get low,” I warn
again, seeing that both Guardian aircraft have hesitated, hanging
in the air in the middle of the valley between the two blasted
mountain ranges. “Whatever’s shooting at us…”

I hear the air crack again. One of the ETE ships
lights up, its shields flaring as it gets swatted backwards. And
bursts…

“GET OUT OF THERE!!” I’m yelling at them.

“Holy shit…” is all Smith can say, as bits of the
shattered ship rain down onto the valley floor.

“It hit them hard enough to penetrate their shields,”
Rick describes the obvious, his playback showing it happen in ultra
slow motion. The otherwise invisible spherical shield around the
ship goes white-hot as the projectile hits it, then deforms a soft
rubber ball, punched inward. Or shot. Whatever hit it still has
enough energy to blow right through the ship from nose to tail,
blasting it apart. Vaporizing it.

“Fuck…” Anton tries to comprehend what we’re seeing.
“Jesus fuck…”

The other ship hesitates, then turns, retreats,
weaving to make a more difficult target. Leaving their
fellows—alive or dead (and I doubt even an ETE could have survived
that)—behind.

“I’m suddenly grateful we have these mountains
blocking our view,” Rick says breathlessly as we put the slopes
between our ship and the devastation.

“Any idea what the hell that was?” Smith still wants
to know. Sakina is looking at me for any kind of useful answer.

“I think it was a rail gun,” Rick finally concludes,
sounding shaky.

Rick and Anton have a full presentation ready by the
time we land and get up to Ops. Lisa’s on Link, as is Mark Stilson,
looking more shaken than I’ve ever seen him.

“How many people did you have on that ship?” I ask
first.

“Five,” he says gravely. “Guardian Patrol from Red
Station. Jonah Carter was piloting. There has been no transmission
yet from survivors. Green Station is sending a rescue party, but
they’ll be going into the pass without a ship. Hopefully that will
deny Chang an easy target.”

“Please let us know what they find.”

He nods heavily, and doesn’t seem to have anything
else to say on the matter. I turn things over to Anton and
Rick.

“We think it was a rail gun,” Anton starts. “No
propellant, no explosive. Just a conductive projectile accelerated
along parallel rails by a massive amount of electrical current.
Range can be hundreds of miles. Does all its damage just with
kinetic energy. A relatively small projectile—maybe a few
kilos—hits harder than a conventional cruise missile. It’s very
much like a meteorite strike.”

“Makes for cheap and easy ammo,” Rick half-praises.
“Downsides are high, though: It needs a ridiculous amount of power,
enough to run a colony or two. And it generates a lot of heat and
friction. Versions I’ve seen usually fail after a few uses,
assuming they don’t tear themselves apart on the first shot.”

“And anyone with infrared scanning can see the thing
lit up like an open blast furnace,” Anton offers.

“Trajectory calculations put the weapon approximately
here,” I get to something more tactically pressing, pointing to an
area in the valley just past Tranquility.

“Chang could control the entire Coprates Chasma,”
Stilson concludes, his anger finally starting to bleed through his
practiced stoicism.

“And anything in central Melas he has a straight shot
at,” Rick makes it worse. “The mountains are protecting our bases.
And your Stations.”

MAI adds potential firing lines to the map.

“For the moment only. He’s got it on a flying
platform,” I have to point out the obvious. And MAI shows us new
firing lines. Assuming just lateral movement, he could target this
base from the east. If he moved into Melas proper, he’d have a shot
at everything—Stations, bases, colony sites…

“He needed the big ship to support the power source,
and to make it mobile,” Anton comes to the cold realization.

“He could fire that thing into
orbit
,” Rick
adds to it grimly. “He could shoot down anything Earth sends.”

“Then we need to take it away from him,” Stilson
concludes, almost sounding like he’s describing a misbehaving
child.

An hour later—an hour spent with Kastl staring at our
still-limited radar screens, which thankfully (or frustratingly)
show no activity—we get another cryptic reply from General
Richards.

“Your recent intelligence is being analyzed. I regret
to say that any countermeasures we could generate from our end will
be at least a year or more from delivery. You are on your own. My
only consolation to you is that your resupply is on schedule for
arrival January 17
^th
. While it contains nothing that
could help you in this situation, you may be able to do some good
with it in a larger sense, spread some goodwill to the locals. God
be with you all, and please know, Colonel, that I have the same
faith in you that my grandfather did. Message ends.”

“Huh,” Kastl comments after a few moments, then
checks something with MAI. “That’s odd, Colonel. The General said
January 17
^th
. I just rechecked the tracking. We should
see our drops hit orbit by the fourteenth.”

It’s almost worth a smile.

17 January 2117:

He comes as expected, minutes after dawn on the
appointed day, the cloud that cloaks his vessel effectively
blotting out the rising sun, as if telling us he can stop our
tomorrow.

But his cloak makes him easy to see coming up on
us—no morning blow looks like the swirling wall of sand he throws
up. That, and the intense EMR signature in the center of it lit up
the discreet sensors we dropped on its likely approach routes. They
tagged him when he got within 50 klicks of the base, coming in from
the east-southeast. (Even if that was all we had, it was still
plenty of warning to get ourselves ready for him.)

The display is only one more proof that Chang is more
about show than tactical practicality. And I wonder if it’s for our
benefit or something else to impress his army of power-blind dupes.
The only thing the thick storm cloud does do effectively is not let
us get a good look at whatever he’s built. And then he doesn’t let
us see at all.

We all hold position while he repeats his last
opening move: bringing his ship in close enough that our Links get
knocked out by his EMR bleed. This also blows his artificial storm
over our bunkers. And that much is smart: Launching a ship of our
own would be risky, both blind and deaf (assuming we had one here
in any condition to launch, a deficit he may not realize). And any
visual coordination of our ground forces or remaining batteries is
impossible in the thick haze. He could open fire with his big gun
and finish us, or at least do catastrophic damage to the base
before we could respond. Or he could launch his own ground assault,
destroy our surface guns and attempt to breach our locks to take
the base.

But as expected, he doesn’t do any of those things.
He’s arrogant. He prefers to posture, to intimidate. So he throws
away his advantage, lets his dust screen fade as the dawn sun
purples the sky, rising behind him through his residual haze. He
wants us to see him. He wants us to see what he’s made.

His ship is a monolithic shadow at first: a huge
cross-shape, all hard angles that begins to look more and more like
a flying junkyard as our view of it gets clearer. From below, it’s
an array of massive slabs and blocks. Its sides are bristling with
a variety of guns, many probably salvaged from the stripped Zodanga
and Frontier colonies. From some of our more distant views, its
topside sprouts squat towers fore and central, while the aft and
wings look to be flat flight decks.

Moored by lines on either side is a Zodangan
dirigible, though these models look stripped down to basics: no
sails, just fans. (Rapidly constructed, or an attempt to reduce
vulnerability?) Their undersides are hung thick with “kite”
fighters. Still, they look especially fragile next to the big
hovering hulk. He must be assuming that all we have left is a few
guns and sparse ammo for them, the way he’s giving us a spread of
targets he expects is too big to hope to take down. Again, it’s the
same play he used last time, only grander.

As the dust slowly clears, we can see that the main
ship is all patchwork welding, with chunks of it still featuring
colonial markings and paint. It looks like a trash sculpture, but
it’s as big as a small aircraft carrier.

Still more show than strategy, he brings his flying
display in close, daring us to shoot first, confident we won’t
dare. He finally stops not two hundred meters east of our pads and
less than thirty meters off the deck.

There’s a conspicuous rectangular maw in the bow of
his flagship, which is likely the “muzzle” of his rail gun. It must
run much of the length of his main hull, mostly protected under a
massive amount of metal, but there seems to be no means to turn or
elevate it, and that says he must have to maneuver his entire ship
to aim the thing. And the cargo-bay-door-sized muzzle is a
potential vulnerability in a powerful but probably fragile
weapon.