The Complete Heritage Trilogy: Semper Mars, Luna Marine, Europa Strike. Ian Douglas

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ flight out of Cydonia was brutal, but mercifully short. The transport was so crowded with Marines—all of them encumbered in their Class-One armor—that there was no room to move or even shift to get into a more comfortable position. “Y’know,” somebody said over the general comm channel, “if they wanted to get rid of all of us in a convenient accident—”

      “Ruhe!” another voice barked. “Be quiet, all of you! No talking!”

      The pilot—Garroway didn’t know if it was one of the UN troops or a NASA pilot working at gunpoint—piled on the Gs for the liftoff from Cydonia…and the acceleration continued for a long time, long enough to convince Garroway that they were making a high-speed run to someplace rather than the usual slower, fuel-conserving suborbital hop.

      He was sitting close enough to one of the shuttle’s small observation ports that he could see a blur of ocher landscape below as they hurtled past. It had taken most of the rest of the night to secure the American prisoners, get them suited up, and to lead them three at a time out to the shuttle on its launchpad. The sun was just coming up, the light casting long fingers of black shadow from each rock or boulder or irregular fold of the chaotic terrain, but they were moving too quickly, and at too low an altitude, for him to tell where they were. At a guess, judging from the direction the shadows were pointing, they were heading more or less southwest, which made a certain amount of sense. There were only two major bases on Mars, Cydonia and Candor Chasma at the equator; they must be heading back for Candor Station.

      The question, of course, was what was going to happen to them when they arrived.

      He felt a growing discomfort in the small of his back, where the wrist-top he’d hidden there was trapped, pinched between him and the inside of his armor. They’d searched him again before he’d suited up, but he’d palmed the microcomputer when they frisked him, hiding it under hands clasped behind his head as they patted him down. By pretending to adjust his trousers before climbing into his armor, he’d managed to hide it again in his waistband. He wondered just how much stress the device could take, though, as several Gs slammed him back into the thinly padded seat.

      Acceleration cut off, and for a long time after that they were in free fall, save for occasional violent thumps and kicks when the pilot fired steering jets to maintain attitude or to adjust their course. Their captors had made certain that all of the Marines were strapped down, and two of them sat now at the forward end of the compartment, as uncomfortable as any of the Americans as they kept an eye on their prisoners.

      Garroway was wedged in between two Marines, with a third sitting half on top of him and half on the Marine to his right. In their armor, they were anonymous…but he could still recognize voices occasionally over the comm channel…mingled occasionally with the harsh, retching sounds of people being sick in their helmets.

      The shuttle’s cargo hold was designed to hold thirty passengers in something like relative comfort, and it could manage another ten, perhaps, with some crowding. That, however, assumed that the passengers weren’t wearing bulky Class-Ones…or EVA suits. Most of the scientists, Garroway noticed, had been kept at Cydonia, but five had been packed into Mars surface suits and loaded aboard the shuttle with the Marines…the ones who’d discovered those Homo erectus corpses two days before. They’d nearly had to drag Alexander physically from the hab and chuck him into the lobber.

      There were twenty-five Marines on board—Colonel Lloyd and Private Groller, both wounded, had been left at Cydonia under the care of Dr. Penkov, the Russian doctor at the base. That put a total of thirty prisoners aboard the shuttle, and the crowding was nightmarish with them all wearing armor or surface EVA suits.

      After a small eternity of free fall, they were jarred by a sharp, dizzying swoop as the shuttle flipped end for end, and then acceleration hammered at them again when the main drive fired. The world tilted sickeningly, and then was obscured by swirling ocher dust as the craft settled in for a cushioned landing on its four hydraulic jacks.

      They were down.

      “Gentlemen, and ladies, we have arrived at your new home,” Bergerac told them, climbing down the narrow ladder from the pilot’s compartment. Had he flown the ship himself, Garroway wondered? No, he could see a NASA pilot behind him, seated at the console. The UN colonel must have been riding strapped to the bridge jumpseat.

      With two UN guards urging them to move, the Marines and scientists clambered awkwardly down the center passageway ladder and into the shuttle’s airlock bay. Since everyone had been suited up for the flight, the shuttle was already open to the Martian atmosphere. The loading ramp was down; in moments, Garroway stood with the others on the cold, still, and nearly airless desert.

      This was not Candor Chasma.

      That fact was beginning to register with the others as well. He heard several low-murmured comments, and several Marines exchanged words by touching their helmets together for a quick, sound-inducted comment or two.

      Garroway had not been to Mars Prime, of course, but he’d read about the place often enough during the cycler flight out, and he’d seen plenty of video transmissions downloaded off the Spacenet. Mars Prime, the first permanent settlement on the red planet, lay close to the site of the first manned landing on the floor of Candor Chasma, one of the larger canyons in the vast and labyrinthine complex of canyons known as Valles Marineris, the Valley of the Mariner Spacecraft. It consisted of some fifteen hab modules, a large, permanent landing strip, and water-drilling, fuel-production, and storage facilities even larger and more extensive than those at Cydonia. Compared to Mars Prime, the base at Cydonia was a small and somewhat primitive frontier outpost.

      This base was smaller still. Located on a valley floor—Garroway could see the distant red cliffs, mostly still lost in shadow but capped by gleaming gold, the reflected light of the rising sun—it was a small outstation of some kind, consisting of a single hab partly covered over by sand and piles of bulldozed regolith. A Mars cat was parked nearby, but Garroway could see no drilling or fuel-production facilities, no storage structures, nothing, in fact, other than the hab, the cat, and the grounded shuttle.

      Lieutenant Russel King, standing nearby, turned to him. “So what do we do now, Major?”

      Garroway blinked at the platoon leader, unable for a moment to reply. Until that moment, he’d not thought about the command structure at all. But with Colonel Lloyd wounded and left at Cydonia, he was the senior officer of a section of twenty-four US Marines, plus five scientists.

      It was not a responsibility that Garroway had ever imagined having to assume.

      The other Marines were talking among themselves, and with growing agitation. “What the fuck?” one man said over the talk channel. “The bastards are just leaving us here?”

      Bergerac stood at the top of the ramp. “We are not monsters,” he told them, “or barbarians. We must have full control of the Cydonian base, however, and for that we need all of you out of the way. I’m sure you all realize that we could have killed you…but instead we are leaving you here, with plenty of food, water, and a portable drilling unit for more water.”

      “I think we need some things clarified, Bergerac,” Garroway said. “Are we prisoners of war?”

      “Technically, of course, no state of war exists between your country and the United Nations, at least for the moment. Let us simply say that we are temporarily reassigning you to this outpost.”

      “Yeah, but for how long?” a woman’s voice—Garroway thought it was Ostrowsky—called out. “You can’t just abandon us here!”

      “Silence СКАЧАТЬ