My worry is about what I might do wrong. Did I train everyone enough? Was there anything I missed? Am I going to screw it all up and get a lot of people killed?
I stare up in the darkness and see no answers. Commander Rackham put me in charge because he figured I’d be the best of those he has available for the job. I’ll have to try to live up to his confidence in me.
After the battle here, what then? If we win, will there be an equally furious fight in orbit around Saturn? If we lose, will we be in for a desperate, last-ditch defense over Jupiter? That’s what we’re all really trying to prevent.
That gets me thinking about the cloud cities of home. Will I ever see them again? I don’t know. I do know I’ll keep them safe, or die trying.
* * * * *
Chapter 10 The Battle of Mars
If Mars is War, and War is Hell, then Mars is Hell. I can’t find any fault in the logic.
I don’t like Mars—and I never have. It’s a barren wasteland, first colonized back when none of us had any idea what we were actually doing. It ate up new colonists faster than even the early Luna bases, though on first glance, Earth’s moon looks more dangerous. But it turns out Luna was more desolate, not more dangerous. Mars was farther away, and it had just enough atmosphere to be a problem, without enough to be useful. Still, eventually, they managed to make it work, and several nations of old Earth established competing permanent colonies. They even established the beginnings of the early terraforming and bio-modified transferred simple life.
Once Terra went bad, several ships landed there filled with people fleeing the new State of Terra. They brought all their old grudges with them and raided each other for desperately needed resources. Soon enough, everyone was fighting everyone else, and that was the beginning of a never-ending tribal war between the angry native cyborgs of Mars. It’s still a desert, almost uninhabitable in most places without extensive cybernetic modification.
It’s a dump, and I don’t think any of us can fix it. Not that we haven’t tried. We and other worlds have helped build additional terraforming stations for Mars. Most of the time, the Martians themselves dismantle the things for spare parts. Now we have to have guards on the terraforming stations to keep the very devices they need to live from being plundered. Honestly, even the corrupt Venusians have managed to terraform their planet by now, yet Mars is still a dump.
If it was up to me, we’d all just leave the planet alone and let the Martians sort it out among themselves. But it’s not up to me. Even if we leave Mars alone, they won’t leave us alone. Saturn set up Deimos Base, clearly planning to take over Mars for use as a platform to assault other worlds, including Jupiter. Then we got involved in it ourselves with Phobos Base, and the Venusians got in there, too. Now, everyone’s got an interest in trying to determine the future of Mars, because the Martians certainly can’t do it themselves, and whoever ends up running Mars can turn it into a problem for everyone else.
That’s why everyone has a stake in Mars, and now the alien has crashed there, too. We’ll all be fighting over a planet no one wants, and which doesn’t want us, either.
* * *
We’re sitting in our frames, getting ready for the fight to come. There isn’t much more we can do to get ready. What we’re actually doing is sitting in our frames and waiting. It takes a long time to cool our frames to 4° Kelvin, so we’re all just sitting in the launch bay, our frames covered with coolant patches, and connected by tubes. If I listen very carefully, I can hear the flow of the liquid helium.
The idea is we’ll be cold as space when we’re launched from the host carrier. With the stealth coatings applied to our armor, and everything powered down and on passive, maybe we can float on ahead of the task force in secret and be in the middle of the enemy before they know it.
Maybe.
With a soft launch, there’ll be no energy emissions to betray when we launched and our vector. The carrier will be maneuvering the whole time, further confusing our launch path. Decoys, also stealthy and cold, will be launched before, during, and after our launch. The whole task force will be coming in from the direction of the Sun. While even the Sun’s light and radiation isn’t going to mask the powerful engines of the decelerating host carrier and escorts, it should help hide us and the stealth attack ships in the fleet. Dazzler drones sending out a chaotic hash of electronic jamming signals will also be flying ahead of the fleet. Along with all this, stealth Vindicator heavy anti-ship missiles will be floating along quietly, just waiting for the order to wake up and strike the targets held in their computers. Finally, we’re going to release countermeasure dust ahead of us, helping to screen our approach, and the high velocity dust should also reveal the locations of enemy mines or targeting satellites when it hits them.
If everything goes according to plan, we’ll be ahead of the fleet and hidden, while the enemy forces reveal themselves trying to engage all the drones and other things out there, letting us clear away
