Colony Down: Battlefield Mars Book 2 Read online

  COLONY DOWN

  Battlefield Mars Book 2

  David Robbins

  © 2016 by David Robbins

  INHUMAN ODYSSEY

  CHAPTER 1

  Captain Archard Rahn had been pushing the tank forever, or so it seemed, when the motion sensors in his battle suit pinged an alarm.

  It was night, and a multitude of stars sparkled in the Martian heavens. It was also bitterly cold. If not for his badly battered but functional RAM 3000, Archard would have succumbed within minutes. The Red Planet’s atmosphere was a lot thinner than Earth’s. So much so, heat that built up during the day quickly dissipated once the sun went down. It wasn’t uncommon for the temperature to plummet to minus 75 Celsius.

  At the moment, though, the cold was the least of Archard’s concerns. He activated his helmet display, seeking the source of the motion. Infrared didn’t show a thing. There were no heat signatures anywhere within range. A new recruit might take that to mean the motion sensors were glitching. He knew better.

  Archard stopped pushing the tank and turned. He ran a full spectrum sweep, but once again, nothing. Momentarily forgetting that everything he said could be heard on the tank’s commlink, Archard quietly swore.

  Right away, Dr. Katla Dkany asked, “Is everything all right out there?”

  Archard hesitated. He refused to worry her unless he was sure. They were close, the two of them. An item, as people used to say long ago on their mother world. He wouldn’t mind becoming even closer, but his personal life, to say nothing of his duty post as the head of security at one of Mars’ three colonies, had been thrown into disarray by the last thing anyone ever expected to find: indigenous life.

  Not that long ago, Archard had his career with the United Nations Interplanetary Corps all worked out. His plan was to stay on Mars a decade or so, then return to Earth and be in the fast lane for promotion.

  Now, there was no telling what his future held. The top brass wouldn’t look favorably on an officer who lost an entire colony.

  “Archard?” Katla said.

  “I’m here,” Archard replied. “Everything is fine at the moment.”

  Everything had been fine at New Meridian, too, until the Martians appeared out of nowhere, or, to be precise, from up out of the ground, and wiped out the third and smallest of the colonies in a single day and night.

  Now, Archard was on his way to the second largest colony, Wellsville, along with six more survivors. The others were in the tank, in reality a large rover built to military specs.

  In addition to state-of-the-art electronics and armor plating, the tank incorporated a Directed Energy Weapon array on top.

  Twelve hundred kilometers. That’s how far it was from New Meridian to Wellsville. And since the tank’s range with a full battery charge was only eight hundred, they were conserving power by having Archard push as often as possible. They were also shaving time. It took at least twelve hours of daylight to recharge the tank, a delay they couldn’t afford. Not when the Martians might be after them.

  Archard resumed pushing. He checked his faceplate display, but there was still no sign of life. He reminded himself that the Martians weren’t like anything on Earth. They didn’t have heat signatures. No heartbeats, either. That had puzzled him at first. Then he remembered that a lot of creatures on Earth didn’t have hearts, either, sponges and jellyfish and the like.

  The Martians reminded him more of crustaceans. He had been meaning to ask Katla if lobsters and crabs had hearts. As a physician and exobiologist, she would know.

  Archard initiated a systems diagnostic on the RAM. He ran one every six hours, as a precaution. They couldn’t afford a malfunction. He must be at top readiness every moment, just in case.

  He went on pushing, his huge metallic feet thunking the ground with every stride. Suddenly, his motion sensors pinged again. This time, there was no doubt. His display registered a ripple of movement. Something was back there, five hundred meters or so, and closing fast.

  That wasn’t all. Whatever the sensors had picked up, the things were airborne.

  At three hundred meters, the battle suit’s night vision displayed four discreet images.

  Archard had a hunch what they were. He’d encountered their kind before, in the bowels of Albor Tholus, a long-dormant volcano. He keyed his commlink. “Katla, who else is awake?”

  “Just me,” she answered. “I’m at the wheel. I spelled Private Everett.”

  Archard imagined the rest sprawled out in the tank’s bay; Everett, Private Pasco, a woman named Trisna Sahir and her daughter, Behula, plus the orphan boy, Piotr Zabinski. “Wake Everett and Pasco. Tell them we have company. Hostiles. I’m going to engage.”

  “Wait…” Katla said.

  Archard didn’t dare let the Martians get close enough to the tank to damage it. Kicking in the RAM’s thrusters, he went airborne himself, arcing up and away. As he flew, he magnified the images on his display. As he had suspected, the creatures were identical to the things he’d fought in the depths of the volcano.

  To the scientists back on Earth, the very idea of Martians, let along the flying variety, would be preposterous. And yet there they were, each as black as the night, with eight pairs of short wings, their vitals protected by a thick carapace. A pair of forelimbs with spikes at the end were folded close to their bodies. He would have thought it aerodynamically impossible for them to fly, but they did, much like hummingbirds.

  Archard arced higher to get above them. The creatures didn’t react. They seemed to be focused on the tank. Bunching the RAM 3000’s huge fists, he boosted his thrusters to the max, and dove. For some reason, they didn’t detect his presence until he was almost on them. Then the nearest slowed and reared in his direction, and he slammed into it like a meteorite, pulverizing its underside as if it were so much mush.

  The other three were instantly on him, from both sides and below. Archard punched and kicked and knocked two away, but the third thrust a spike at the RAM. He twisted to avoid it and felt the spike scrape his chest plate. Ramming the battle suit’s knee into the creature’s frontal ridge, he sent it spinning.

  His reprieve was temporary. The other two were already converging.

  Extending his right arm, Archard let them get so close he could see their multifaceted eyes glittering in the starlight. He activated his flamethrower. There was the loud whoosh of chemical fire, and both Martians became blazing balls. The pair dropped like rocks, the stubs of their charred wings beating uselessly.

  The creature he had kneed did the last thing Archard expected, or wanted. It broke off and fled, no doubt to let the rest of its kind know where to find the tank.

  Archard couldn’t let that happen. He took off after it.

  Chief Administrator Levlin Winslow’s last memory was of having his head ripped off. So when he abruptly became conscious, he was considerably surprised.

  His confusion was compounded by a strange green glow that filled his vision, and a feeling of being wet. He couldn’t understand how he could see or feel anything with his head detached from his body.

  Winslow tried to look around, but he couldn’t move. He tried to blink his eyes to clear his vision and realized he didn’t have eyes to blink. In fact, when he mentally reached down inside himself, he couldn’t feel his body. It wasn’t there.

  Shock jolted him as he realized his head really had been torn off. But then, how was he aware of the green glow? And how did he account for the sensation of being wet?

  Winslow’s bewilderment was boundless. Nothing made sense. For that matter, his whole life had become utter chaos since New Meridian was attacked. He figured the best way to come to terms with his predicament was
to relive the sequence of events that brought him to his bizarre state.

  The nightmare began, Winslow recalled, when a boy by the name of Piotr Zabinski, who lived with his parents at an outlying farm, went missing. Captain Rahn had taken the U.N.I.C. security detachment to investigate. No one expected it to amount to much. The boy had probably wandered off. But to Winslow’s amazement, the next he heard from Rahn, the boy’s mother and father had been torn to pieces, and Rahn and his men were in pursuit of the creatures responsible.

  Winslow had prayed the captain was wrong. After all, the oldest of the colonies had been on Mars for well over a century, and in all that time, the Earthers had been left in peace.

  Why did it have to happen at my colony? Winslow lamented. Why couldn’t the Martians have attacked Wellsville or Bradbury?

  Winslow recalled hurrying home from his office, intending to seek safety in the secret Survival Shelter under his Domicile. But the Martians were waiting. They could bore anywhere, those fiends. They had callously slain his wife and taken him captive.

  Winslow experienced again his abject fright as he was whisked along seemingly endless passages until his captors reached an underground city. The spectacle of a culture so alien, of beings so unfathomable and hostile, had been almost more than he could bear.

  He vividly remembered the thousands of pinkish-red worker or soldier Martians, their carapaces about a meter around. He remembered, too, the large blue kind, nine meters in length, and his impression that they were a warrior caste. Then there was the yellow Martian he’d encountered, who appeared to hold a position of authority.

  Most especially, Winslow relived being brought to a high-ceilinged chamber filled with benches and bowls and odd apparatus. The walls were lined with shelves, and on many of those shelves rested the severed heads of a lot of his fellow New Meridian colonists.

  Even as he’d taken all of that in, a four-meter-tall brown Martian with an umbrella-shaped carapace had approached. He’d tried to explain that he was an important government official, and that it was in the Martians’ own interest not to harm him.

  Hardly were the words out of his mouth when the creature ripped off his head.

  And now? Winslow had no idea. If he could, he would have cried. As it was, all he could do was imagine opening the mouth he didn’t have, and screaming. When he finally stopped, it was only to gird himself to scream some more.

  CHAPTER 2

  Dr. Katla Dkany resisted an impulse to run to the airlock and exit the tank when the RAM 3000 streaked into the night sky. She wasn’t wearing her EVA suit. Without it, she wouldn’t last thirty seconds.

  The Robotic Armored Man-O-War was out of sight almost immediately. Katla never had understood why the military called it that when it wasn’t a true robot at all.

  Twisting in the driver’s seat, she reached across and poked the sleeping soldier on the passenger side. “Private Everett,” she said quietly, careful not to let her voice betray her anxiety. Should they lose Archard, their chances of reaching Wellsville were next to nil.

  Everett snapped awake and sat up. He hailed from the hill country of Kentucky, and often impressed her with his cat-like reactions and reflexes. “What is it, ma’am?”

  “Captain Rahn has gone to investigate something he picked up on his motion sensors.”

  Everett bent to the dash and switched on a screen. He adjusted the controls until a blip appeared, rising swiftly. “That would be the captain.” He punched a button and turned a knob and a quartet of rippling images briefly registered. “Those would be the something’s.”

  “Martians,” Katla said. Although she had never seen the flying kind, Archard had told her about them.

  “Those critters must have been on our trail a while,” Everett remarked, tweaking the gain.

  “They’re intelligent beings, not animals. Animals don’t live in cities.”

  “City. Hive. Whatever you want to call it,” Everett said. “You ask me, these Martians are nothing but overgrown bugs.”

  “If you insist on comparing them to home-world organisms,” Katla said, “they resemble crustaceans more than insects.”

  “Call them whatever you like, Doc,” Everett said. “The important thing is they want us dead so we can’t warn the other colonies.”

  “We don’t know that for certain.”

  “I’m a hell of a good guesser.”

  Katla would readily admit that the Martians had displayed amazing tactical ability in their attack on New Meridian. But she still felt compelled to say, “We need to be careful not to anthropomorphize them.”

  “There you go again with those big words,” Private Everett said, and chuckled. “Why are you making such a fuss over this, anyhow?”

  “We can’t afford mistakes, and to assume they think like we do is the worst one we can make.”

  “I’m not much interested in how they think,”

  Everett said. “Only in how they die.”

  Katla reminded herself that the Kentuckian was a combat trooper, not a strategist.

  “We should switch places in case we have to get out of here in a hurry,” Everett suggested. Rising, he came around the console.

  Katla didn’t argue. She had only been handling the wheel so he could rest. Getting up, she moved aside. A glance at the bay showed the other trooper, Private Pasco, as well as Trisna and her little girl Behula, and the boy Piotr, fast asleep. “It’s hard to believe we’re all that’s left of an entire colony,” she remarked.

  “We don’t reach Wellsville, we can kiss it goodbye, too,” Everett said. “And a lot more folks live there than lived at New Meridian.”

  Katla checked the screen. Archard’s blip was growing smaller. “What is Captain Rahn doing?”

  Private Everett tapped a small ripple effect. “I believe he’s killed the other three and has lit out after the last flying crab or shrimp or whatever you want to call them.”

  “How about if we just call them Martians?” Katla said.

  “Fine by me,” Everett said, “so long as we make them dead.”

  Captain Archard Rahn was going all-out but couldn’t gain on the flying Martian. The creatures were incredibly fast. Complicating his pursuit was the fact that the only way to detect them was to use his motion sensor, and at the speed the creature was traveling, keeping a fix was difficult.

  His targeting GPS told Archard that the Flyer, as he’d dubbed them, was heading northeast. Straight for Albor Tholus, the volcano that harbored their underground city.

  In his mind’s eye, Archard saw yet again their vast metropolis of strange structures and relived the shock he’d felt at discovering Mars was inhabited. Contrary to everything the experts claimed, indigenous life did exist. It amazed him that the best minds in the scientific communities and military echelons could have been so wrong.

  Archard gave a shake of his head, and focused. He needed to stop that Flyer. He needed to stop it now.

  The RAM was fitted with an army’s worth of firepower; ion cannons, magnetic bombs, a flame thrower, grenades, darts, missiles and more. Each miniaturized except for the ion cannons. He selected a conventional missile, centered the crosshairs on the Flyer’s rippling image, and when the crosshairs flashed to let him know targeting had been acquired, he let fly.

  The missile shot from his wrist gauntlet like a bolt from a crossbow. He followed its flight on his helmet display. When it was two-thirds of the way there, the Flyer either sensed it or heard it, and flew faster. But there was no outrunning the missile. No evading it, either, although the Flyer tried zigzagging and streaking high and then dropping low, and performing aerial loop-de-loops.

  The explosion was a large orange circle on the RAM’s display.

  Archard needed to be certain. He honed in on the debris field. Slowing, he descended as lightly as a sparrow, a remarkable feat given that the battle suit weighed over a ton.

  Once his huge boots thumped down, Archard turned on his spotlight. The bright unibeam lit up everything
for fifty meters in all directions. He didn’t have to look far. To one side lay part of the Martian’s carapace. To the other, a severed wing. The missile had done its job.

  Satisfied, Archard rose into the air and made for the tank.

  He didn’t like leaving the others alone. They would worry. And they were vulnerable, should the Martians attack en masse.

  By Archard’s reckoning, they would reach Wellsville by afternoon. Their long and arduous trek would finally be over.

  He could imagine the consternation their arrival would cause, especially once word spread that New Meridian had been overrun. The devastating news would be relayed to Earth, and hopefully the U.N.I.C. would send more troops and armaments before the Red Planet lived up to its name a second time.

  As a soldier, Archard should be raring to take the enemy on in pitched combat and defeat them. The thing was, it could easily turn out the other way around. The Martians vastly outnumbered the Earthers. Plus, Mars was their world. The Martians were defending hearth and home, as it were, from invaders. That gave them a psychological edge. Provided, of course, their minds were anything like those of humans.

  Archard harbored a suspicion they weren’t. Based on what he’d seen, he suspected that Martian psychology was as grotesque as their physiology. So much so, countering it might prove impossible.

  In which case, the remaining colonies were doomed.

  CHAPTER 3

  For Chief Administrator Levlin Winslow, the wait was endless. He was desperate for something---for anything---to happen. His entire world consisted of the strange green glow. His awareness extended no further. Whatever existed beyond the glow, he couldn’t guess.

  It didn’t help that Winslow was plagued by the constant sensation of being wet. And yet, not ‘wet’ in a normal sense. It was as if he was submerged in a bathtub, but there was no tub, and no water.

  The sensations baffled him. They were beyond the pale of his experience. He was a politician, not a scientist. Specifically, a political appointee. He’d had to kiss a lot of butt to be given the ripe plum of a colony on Mars. But that was all right. He didn’t mind currying favor. Or, as his unfortunate wife liked to call it, sucking up.