minutes of air. The hissing you’ll hear around you is okay; that’s inert gas, creating point five atmospheres of pressure in the ball. Wait here.”
Trevor slipped away from the chair, listened beyond the door. The smoke was not quite as thick, but, having filled a single room with only two narrow exits, its dissipation was slower than usual. He knelt, ducked his head around the corner.
One bright white silhouette was just entering the main room, the suggestion of another one, maybe two, hanging back in the corridor’s entryway.
Trevor pulled Peak’s pistol out, sighted carefully, high in the first silhouette’s chest, and fired twice.
The silhouette went down, and after a quick, blind fusillade, the other two ducked back.
So did Trevor-only to discover the hostage trying to pull the tape off her mouth. For one incongruously mischievous moment, he was tempted to make her leave it there-but toggled his radio, instead: “Crossbow, I have the package.”
“Copy that, Quarrel. I see the fuse now, and have locked on. Ordnance is hot and ready to fly. Waiting your mark.”
“Roger, Crossbow. Out.” Turning: “Into the ball. Right now. No talking. We’ve got to go.”
To her credit, she was already pulling the activation tab. The ball’s two halves burgeoned outwards; she sat between them. Trevor nodded approvingly, sidestepped back to the doorway; a thermal glimmer suggested the kidnappers had returned to their earlier covering position at the doorway into the corridor.
This was the tricky part-how to get the loaded rescue ball from the storm room to the exfiltration point he’d chosen. He hoped the last five of the bastards hadn’t had the time to fully suit up; if they had, his plan might not work. But their lack of both time and discipline was on his side. Of course, there was also the backup plan-to call in the heavy artillery-but even in the storm room, there was no guarantee that he and the hostage wouldn’t wind up as corpses themselves. Rockets tend not to be discriminating about who they kill, and the walls of the storm room were designed keep out brief bursts of solar radiation-not hypersonic projectiles.
Trevor turned back, found himself face to face with a Day-Glo orange and reflective-white bubble, topped by a set of heavy handles and a winch loop. He picked up one handle, moved the ball to one side of the pressure door, then set the MP-5 to full automatic. Twenty-five rounds left: not enough to win a gun battle, but that wasn’t his plan anyway. He just had to make sure that they kept their heads down for a few seconds.
Releasing the MP-5 to hang on its sling, and taking Peak’s Sig Sauer in a steady, two-handed grip, he swung to the opposite side of the pressure door and leaned out a bit. From that angle, he could just see the small window in the outer airlock door: a plate-sized thermal anomaly. Taking careful aim, he started to fire. On the third shot, he hit it-
The klaxon started to shriek yet again-now in the triple-time yowling that meant a critical pressure breach. The smoke gusted out in that direction, along with a slow cyclone of papers, napkins, and other rubbish. Trevor stowed the pistol, grabbed the MP-5-just as one of the kidnappers poked his head around the corner. Trevor sent a snap-burst-three, maybe four rounds-in that general direction. The figure ducked back-hit or not, Trevor couldn’t tell.
And didn’t have the time to ascertain: grabbing the top of the rescue ball, he lifted its sixty-three kilos as though it were twenty-five-thankful for the 0.37 Mars gravity that made such a feat possible. He sprinted out the door-the ball and occupant bouncing sharply off the jamb as he went-and then through the already-diminishing maelstrom of escaping air. Halfway across the room, he spun, fired a quick burst at the corridor entry without stopping to check if there were any targets. Trevor just wanted to keep their heads down long enough to get out, because once the kidnappers had all clambered into their spacesuits, there would be plenty of real targets-too many.
As Trevor reached the far wall, he pulled out the ten-millimeter pistol and emptied the remainder of its magazine in two vertical lines, about four feet apart. The rounds did not penetrate, but the metal prefab sheeting was bent, and, at the impact apexes, ruptured. He snapped down his helmet, produced and opened the last small packet he had removed from his LSU: a 1.5-meter cord of C-8 plastic explosive with a pinch-contact igniter-all together, about the size of a shot glass. He stuck one end of the plastique on the wall above the left set of bullet holes, unspooled the rest in a chest-high arc to end at the top of the other vertical line of scars, yanked the four- meter microwire igniter leads out straight-and turned on his heel to fire another burst back at the passageway behind him.
Just in time: an emerging figure ducked back, firing two wild rounds.
Wild rounds, yes-but they weren’t blind, this time: they could see him just as well as he could see them, now that the smoke had been sucked out. Time to go.
Dragging the rescue ball so that it was behind his body, Trevor let the MP-5 fall loose on its lanyard and pulled the safety sleeve off the pinch contacts. He pressed them together.
The blast was not loud in the thin Martian atmosphere, but it tumbled him off the side of the rescue ball. Catching up the MP-5 in his right hand, and the ball in his left, he toggled his helmet’s commo bar with his jaw. “Crossbow, I am removing the package.”
“Quarrel, I see your new doorway. We are locked and off-safety.”
At the jagged hole that he had blasted in the side of the dome, Trevor had to pause to maneuver the rescue ball through without slicing it open on the torn edges of the prefab, all the time keeping his body angled so he could keep an eye on the passageway. Good thing: two spacesuited figures came around that corner, one high, one low- the high one firing with his own MP-5.
Trevor crouched, aimed, dumped the entire magazine: the standing shooter went down, the other one put a crease in the left arm of Trevor’s suit before ducking back behind the doorjamb.
Trevor rolled the rescue ball through the gap-feeling the contents thump awkwardly around as he did so-and popped out into the tan-pink dust swirls of a fifty-kph Martian breeze. “I am out-and it is a hot exfil, Crossbow. Repeat, hot exfil.”
“You call it, Quarrel. I have you only five meters from the target zone, and I see thermal blooms in the building behind you.”
“Do you have smoke?”
“Negative: live warheads only.”
“Give me my range.”
“You are at twelve meters from target. Do you see the gully-at your two o’clock?”
“Roger. Good eyes.”
“You are still danger-close.”
“Just fire on my mark.”
Trevor swerved in the direction of the gully, felt something clip him in the rear of his right thigh as he pushed the rescue ball over its edge. As he dove into the natural trench himself, he yelled, “Mark!”
There was a half second of silence, and then, even through the thin Martian atmosphere, there was a momentary, soaring roar-like an up-dopplering freight train driven by jets-which passed almost directly overhead. It was cut short by a tremendous blast behind him, which sent fragments of stone and metal spattering into and over the trench, and which painted the surrounding rocks with a flickering glaze of orange and red light. Then the light was gone, and, a moment later, the concluding rumble of the detonation had faded as well.
Trevor stood up as the last pieces of debris came down. The entire northeast corner of the dome was gone, some of the edges pounded inward, others torn outwards. Thermal imaging showed the heat of some quickly smothering fires-and one or two prone, rapidly cooling biomasses. Any others were either cowering further inside-or had been reduced to protoplasm.
“Quarrel, we show all clear. Confirm.”
“Crossbow, the LZ is clear.”
“We’ll be there in fifteen seconds. Quarrel, your biomonitors are showing us three suit breaches, two wounds. One of those breaches hasn’t been fully autosealed. Recommend you use suit patches all speed.”
“Already on it, Crossbow.”
Ten seconds later, the transatmospheric assault VTOL-a cubist wasp with ordnance bristling under its wings and belly-swerved into sight, sucking up coils and curlicues of the tan-pink dust as it banked, straightened, and hovered, just a foot off the ground. Trevor picked up the rescue ball, discovered that his left leg was wobbly, got a hand from a tan-and-gray spacesuited figure who hopped down from the payload bay. Together, they hoisted the
