Species War: Battlefield Mars Book 3 Page 12

  KLL-17, still limping, tried to spring above a closing circle of Martians. His leg must have given way because he pitched into his foes instead. Like piranha tearing at a horse, the Martians tore KLL-17 to bits, one of them claiming his head.

  “Run!” KLL-12 shouted. He threw the creature he was carrying to forestall a rush. It bought them the seconds they needed to whirl and flee, taking the steps five at a time.

  “Still having fun?” KLL-12 snapped at KLL-13 as they reached the next landing.

  Her face smeared with gore, she smiled and said, “Bite me.”

  For some reason, KLL-12 laughed.

  40

  General Constantine Augusto was fit to be tied. Despite his meticulous planning, everything was falling apart.

  The worst aspect was having his own brilliance used against him. He was certain that capturing a Martian leader was crucial to ultimate victory. The fact that their two species couldn’t communicate was of piddling concern. He’d had every confidence his science people and the psych department could crack the Martian open like a hammer cracking a nut and have the thing spilling its secrets in no time.

  He’d never imagined the creatures would use his master stroke against him. That his prisoner could become the focal point---by somehow drawing the other Martians to it---for an attack on U.N.I.C. headquarters.

  And now here he was, on the run, fleeing up the stairs with his subordinates and about half the BioMarines.

  Above them, bedlam had broken out. His commlink was a jumble of panicked cries and appeals for help.

  Major Fogarty, at his elbow, said urgently, “General, I’ve just received a report that the Martians have engaged our perimeter defenses.”

  “Damn it to hell,” General Augusto fumed. “I need to get up there. I can’t direct a war from this stairwell.”

  “That’s not all,” Major Fogarty said. “It isn’t just HQ that’s being undermined. The Martians are digging under the entire colony. Buildings all over are sliding into the ground.”

  As if to accent that point, HQ lurched and tilted, nearly pitching General Augusto to his knees. Fortunately, a large reptilian hand swooped down and steadied him.

  “Sir!” KLL-1 said. “My point squad and rear guard are under attack.”

  “The BioMarines can more than hold their own,” General Augusto said. “We keep going.”

  “I recommend we expedite your extraction,” KLL-1 said. “Let me and some of the others carry you up.”

  “Carry me?” Augusto said.

  “We can go a lot faster that way,” KLL-1 said.

  “Like a damn baby?”

  “Please. Your safety is paramount.”

  General Augusto would burn in hell before he would let his men see him being carried. “I can manage on my own, thank you very much.”

  “But sir…” KLL-1 began and got no further.

  The walls on either side exploded as borer Martians broke through. One instant they were there, the next they had withdrawn, leaving gaping holes that were filled by scuttling torrents of the small red crabs.

  “Protect the general!” KLL-1 bellowed, and the BioMarines and the troopers went into action, the hybrids forming a living barrier between the Martians and Augusto, the

  soldiers opening up with their ICW’s.

  A mad melee ensued, savage combat with no quarter given.

  General Augusto tried to draw his sidearm, a Tactical LASR, but was jostled by his protectors and nearly lost his grip. Using both hands, he raised it and pressed the stud that engaged the nanocircuitry. The LASR was so expensive to manufacture that they were only issued to officers at the highest echelons. They were worth every penny. As the acronym implied, they were miniature lasers, able to slice through organic and inorganic matter like a hot knife through butter.

  Augusto centered his LASR’s sights on the Martians pouring from the left-side hole and fired. A vivid red beam literally cut creatures in two. Careful not to hit the BioMarines and troopers struggling all around him, he felled over twenty Martians, slowing their attack. Smiling grimly, he switched to the other entry point and slew a slew of crustoids.

  Augusto was thrilled to his core to be in combat again. It had been ages since he last risked his own hide like this. These days, he fought from behind the scenes, the puppet master who sent other men and women to live or die for the greater good of all humanity.

  A falling body knocked him sideways and brought him out of himself. Startled, he looked down, and his breath caught in his throat.

  KLL-1 lay at his feet, a score of wounds in various stages of healing that would never occur because half of KLL-1’s face was missing. His remaining eye seemed to focus on Augusto, then glazed over.

  General Augusto glanced up. Only now did he realize that more than half the BioMarines were down and but a few troopers were left. He didn’t see Major Fogarty. He turned to run, and a red Martian sprang. In reflex, he cored it with his LASR.

  “General!” one of the remaining troopers hollered.

  General Augusto swung toward him in time to see the man’s head ripped from his body.

  Martians continued to stream from the holes in twin rivers of carapaces.

  General Augusto fired, backpedaled, fired again. He spun and fired. He dodged and fired.

  The last trooper died screamed.

  Only a couple of BioMarines were alive and they were crawling with Martians.

  Dazed at how swiftly they had been beaten, Augusto stumbled over bodies to the rail. He would not be taken alive. He would take a header and die as a soldier should. Firing right and left, he gripped the rail and prepared to hurtle to his doom. But even as he raised his leg, his other leg was seized by a Martian gripper. Twisting, he pointed his LASR but another creature clamped onto his wrist and pushed his arm up. He fired anyway, and a third Martian wrenched the LASR from his grasp.

  In the blink of an eye, General Augusto’s remaining arm and leg were clamped tight. With disheartening swiftness, four of the things bore him over the piles of dead and into the dark maw of a jagged hole.

  41

  Captain Archard Rahn and the rest of the flankers reached the next landing. So far, so good, he thought. But he was only kidding himself. He and those with him---seven BioMarines and five troopers---weren’t enough to stem a swarm. He only hoped the Martians were content with rescuing their leader.

  More rumbling from below resulted in another sharp shift in the stairs. Archard was able to keep his balance, barely.

  “I hate this,” a trooper with the name Cavanaugh on his uniform complained. “I feel so helpless.”

  “Buck up, Corporal,” Archard said by way of encouragement he didn’t feel. “Once we’re topside, we’ll be all right.”

  “If we get there,” Corporal Cavanaugh said dispiritedly.

  Archard kept an eye on the stairs behind them. The Martian’s hadn’t appeared yet but they were bound to come pouring out of the interrogation room any moment.

  One of the BioMarines came to his side, a female. “Captain,” she said. “I’m KLL-18.”

  His attention still on the stairs, Archard responded, “Pleased to meet you.”

  “I’m in constant contact with KLL-1,” she informed him. “He has the general, and they are about two levels above us.”

  “Good,” Archard said. But he was thinking that the general should be moving faster.

  Bending, KLL-18 said so only he would hear, “You are the ranking officer in this group. You should be aware of the sounds we are hearing.”

  “Sounds?” Archard said.

  KLL-18 nodded. “Our hearing is more acute than yours.” She nodded at the walls. “We are picking up noises. They are not clear but something is happening on the other side.”

  “What can it be but Martians?”

  “I suggest we hurry and catch up to General Augusto. There is strength in numbers, as you humans like to say. KLL-1 agrees. He told me to talk to you. He is

  worried for the general�
��s safety.”

  “Pick up the pace, then,” Archard said, and managed a lopsided smile. “Us humans will do our best to keep up.”

  KLL-18 gestured, and the BioMarines increased their speed. So did Archard and the other troopers.

  Archard noticed at KLL-18 and the other hybrids had formed a square around him and his men. The BioMarines weren’t being obvious about it but they clearly intended to protect the soldiers.

  “Decent of you,” Archard told her.

  “Sorry?” she said.

  Archard swept an arm at her and her fellows.

  “We are conditioned to put human welfare before our own,” KLL-18 said. “But I would do it anyway.”

  “Oh?” Archard said. The small talk was helping to take his mind off Katla.

  “We are U.N.I.C.,” KLL-18 said. “We always have each other’s backs, yes?”

  “Booyah,” Archard said.

  “Exactly so,” she said, grinning.

  They came to another landing. The two BioMarines in the lead had stopped and were standing close to a wall, their ears practically touching it.

  “What do you hear?” KLL-18 said.

  One of them opened his mouth to answer but whatever he said was drowned out by the grinding din of a giant borer exploding through the wall above him. Debris and dust rained down, obscuring the living drill for the seconds the creature took to withdrawn from the huge hole it had made.

  Through the opening streamed Martians.

  The two BioMarines below the hole were buried under an avalanche of crustoids.

  “Close up! Close up!” Archard bellowed, and opened fire. In the confines of the stairwell, they stood a better chance back-to-back. The troopers near him complied, adding their firepower to his.

  KLL-18 and the remaining BioMarines formed a line in-between and met the Martians rush with a ferocity that had to be seen to be believed. They smashed, they crushed, they tore limbs. The initial charge faltered but it was only temporary. A river of Martians continued to flow through the hole, more than enough to replace those that had fallen. KLL-18 and her test-tube kindred fell back a few steps but then held their ground, refusing to give another centimeter.

  The combat became a blur of slaughter and gore.

  Archard and the troopers did what they could to help, downing Martians when clear shots presented themselves.

  Archard was so intent on doing what he could for the hybrids that he didn’t realize the mistake he was making in not watching his own back until Corporal Cavanaugh gave a piercing yell.

  “Behind us! Good God, they’re behind us, too!”

  Martians were scrambling up the stairs. There were so many, they covered not only the steps but the rails and the walls.

  “Frags!” Archard commanded and triggered a grenade at optimum range.

  The blasts were near-deafening, even with Archard’s helmet baffles. The explosions shook the stairwell and left a pulped heap of mangled Martians.

  A new tide of creatures flowed over the slain. Forelimbs spread, grippers splayed, they sought to close with the human invaders of their planet.

  “Frags again!” Archard roared. “On my mark.” He aimed his ICW. “Now!”

  Five weapons chuffed in unison, lobbing five grenades that detonated simultaneously. Martians were pulverized.

  Archard heard a cry of agony behind him but he didn’t dare look to see how the BioMarines were doing. Raising his ICW, he roared, “Incendiaries!”

  Sheets of flame engulfed the creatures, incinerating some and turning others into wildly careening fireballs. The heat was blistering.

  This time, the Martians were slower to recover.

  Archard risked a glance over his shoulder.

  Only four of the seven BioMarines were still alive. KLL-18 was one of them, and she and her companions were slaying with brutal efficiency.

  “Here they come again!” Corporal Cavanaugh hollered.

  The flames were dwindling and the Martians had regrouped.

  “Autofire!” Archard shouted.

  A withering hailstorm met the foremost Martians, turning their carapaces into the crustacean equivalent of Swiss cheese. Scores fell, but scores more filled the gaps.

  “Back up!” Archard yelled to gain them room but they had nowhere to go. The BioMarines were at their backs.

  “Give them hell!” Archard shouted, and did so, shooting and shooting, constantly shifting as targets presented themselves. Everything became a whirl of movement and death. He was jostled. Bumped. Nearly bowled over. He dropped a crab lunging at his legs, shot another in midair. He heard Corporal Cavanaugh yell and a scream of mortal terror. Martians were all over. A BioMarine battled on his left and a trooper fought on his right and the dying and dead were in piles. He fired yet again. A blow to his hip staggered him. He felt a gripper on his arm and then a tremendous jolt to his head and he pitched forward onto dead Martians. Something heavy crashed onto his back and then the jumble of sensations were erased by a black emptiness and there was nothing, nothing at all.

  42

  To call it bedlam did not do it justice.

  As the massive cloud descended, so did a preternatural twilight. From out of the murk rose screams and curses and gurgling rattles that ended in death wails.

  The United Nations Interplanetary Command had planned for every contingency. Or so they thought. Their experts never imagined that the denizens of the Red Planet would use dust as a weapon. Nor did it occur to the big brains that instead of being content with burrowing up into a colony through random tunnels, the Martians might elect to undermine a colony’s entire foundation by excavating the very earth out from under them.

  All this went through Private Everett’s mind as the ground under him rumbled and shook and a phalanx of crustaceans scrabbled over the uneven terrain toward the trench he was defending. The dust was so thick that he could barely make them out.

  Everett poured autofire into the horde. Beside him, Private Keller did the same. Somewhere on his right side, Captain Ferris was firing, and on the other Sergeant Kline was bellowing something or other.

  Everett’s skin crawled at the prospect of being overrun. An inevitable outcome, given their numbers and the fact that their masers, lasers and ion cannons were being effectively neutralized by the dust. Since the Martians didn’t register on infrared, targeting had to be done using motion sensors, and the motion sensors were going haywire trying to distinguish between the particles of swirling dust and discreet targets.

  The masers and lasers and cannons were still firing but not as effectively, as the chatter on Everett’s commlink made clear.

  His magazine went empty and Everett ejected it and slapped in a new one. He looked up just as a red Martian sprang out of the dust at his face. He recoiled, bracing for the worst, and in that split-second, a burst of autofire cut it down.

  Sergeant Kline materialized. “Where’s the captain?” he yelled. “I can’t raise her.”

  Everett pointed. “Over yonder. I lost track of her in all this dust.”

  “You and Keller are on me,” Sergeant Kline said, and dashed past them.

  “You heard the man, Kentucky,” Keller said, firing as she backpedaled.

  Staying at her side, Everett sprayed lead. Whether he scored or not he couldn’t say.

  Keller slapped in a new magazine of her own. “We are off-the-scale screwed.”

  “Tell me about it,” Everett said, boosting the gain on his helmet mic to its limit. He heard none of the telltale scritching that would warn him the Martins were close, although up and down the line a battle royal continued to rage.

  Private Keller twisted around. “I can’t even see the colony. It’s got to be bad there, too, don’t you think?”

  “The last we saw, buildings were sliding into the ground,” Everett said. “So yeah.”

  The trench gave a violent heave as if it were alive and a crack appeared practically under their feet.

  “They must be digging underneath us!”
Keller cried.

  Everett jumped over the crack and went faster. It was discouraging how the Martians had outwitted them, completely and thoroughly. But he refused to give up. “All that matters is we’re alive.”

  “Knock on wood,” Keller said.

  The firing along their trench had lessened. Behind them, an ion cannon was giving the Martians as much hell as it could by firing at random into the dust cloud.

  In front of them, figures moved, and Keller shouted, “Look out!”

  “Don’t shoot!” Everett said, pushing her arm aside.

  It was Sergeant Kline and Captain Ferris, the noncom supporting the officer. The captain’s face was contorted in pain and her right arm hung limp. Additionally, there was a rip in the pant leg of her EVA suit. Kline motioned for them to hunker and carefully lowered Ferris to a knee.

  “How bad, ma’am?” Everett said, afraid decompression would claim her life any instant.

  “My suit is sealing,” Captain Ferris said through clenched teeth. “But I think my arm is broken. Maybe a couple of ribs, too. One of those big blue Martians got me down before I could kill it.”

  Sergeant Kline said, “The word is, the colony is about to fall. No one can raise the general, and an evacuation has been ordered.”

  “By who?” Private Keller said.

  “Does it matter?” Sergeant Kline replied. “We’re getting out of here. That is, if the captain has no objections.”

  Ferris bit her lower lip and shook her head. “I sure as blazes don’t. We need to reach the drop ships, Sergeant. They’re our only hope.”

  “We stay close together,” Sergeant Kline said to Everett and Keller. “Watch each other’s backs.”

  “Goes without saying,” Private Keller said.

  “I’m saying it anyway,” Sergeant Kline said, and with Captain Ferris propped against him, started off.

  Private Everett swallowed. His mouth was so dry, it hurt to try. “Let’s hope the drop ships wait for us.”

  “I’m trying to raise them,” Sergeant Kline said.

  “I’m telling you right now,” Private Keller said. “If I make it off this damn planet, I’m never coming back.”