CHAPTER NINETEEN
I entered Landing Bay One, which was dark as death and silent.
The night-for-day lenses in my visor lit the scene well enough. The landing-bay floor was enormous and packed tight with seven transports. Parked with their rear hatches open, the heavy birds sat so close together that their stubby wings interlocked like a cog. I had to walk along the outer wall of the landing bay to get to my ride; the space between the ships was too tight.
The men in my company had already boarded the transports. I expected to find them swarming the deck like ants at a picnic; but there was no room on the deck, so they huddled in the kettles, readying for war. If I listened in over the interLink, I would hear some of the men muttering final prayers and others swapping jokes, the more profane the better. Some men faced death in quiet meditation; some tried to hide their fear from everyone, especially themselves.
A few of the boys gave in to the dangerous temptation of rechecking their weapons. Marines clean and load their weapons the day before the mission, when they are calm. There’s always a temptation to distract yourself by stripping and cleaning your piece on the way to battle, but nervous men tend to speck up. Guns that worked perfectly sometimes jammed when stripped and assembled right before battle. Equipment that was safely packed sometimes fell out of your go-pack if you tried to reorganize on the way to the battlefield.
The spy ship was still a few minutes from the barges but closing in quickly when I entered the lead transport. The sailor coordinating the mission gave the signal, and our pilot sealed the rear hatch and prepared to launch.
A sled towed the transport through the flight tube, past disabled atmospheric locks. We did not launch when we reached the end of the runway. Our transports weren’t cloaked. Once they launched, the Unifieds would spot them, and the countdown would begin. Instead of leaving our transports lined up on the deck, Flight Control lined us up in the tube. As each bird left the ship, the next one would follow on her tail.
Along with a company of Marines, our transport carried a team of three sailors. Once we secured the barge, it would fall upon these men to pilot her out. I hoped they were up to the challenge. We had no intel about what we might find inside the barges. For all we knew, they worked off brain waves or fart commands.
As I waited in the kettle, a Marine approached me and saluted. He said, “General Harris, sir, the other transports are in place.” My visor read his identity from a chip in his visor and labeled him Major Hunter Ritz.
I returned his salute. “Ritz,” I said. “Didn’t you serve on Terraneau?”
“Yes, sir. From the beginning, sir,” he said. “I went down with you and Hollingsworth when you liberated the planet.”
He couldn’t see through the visor of my helmet, but a smile worked its way across my lips. Not many men had survived that battle. “And now you’re a company commander?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
I was glad to have a battle-tested Marine in my ranks, a man who would not lose control if things headed south.
“I’m going up to the cockpit,” I said.
“Aye, sir,” Ritz said.
Heading into this battle, he was all spit and polish, but I remembered Ritz on Terraneau. He stumbled into a dormitory filled with orphaned girls and referred to it as a harem. Spit and polish were the last fluids on his mind that day.
Those were the same girls Ava had taught in her classes. They were all dust now. Everyone remaining on Terraneau was dust.
The sea of men parted for me as I crossed the kettle. I climbed the ladder, walked the tight catwalk, and entered the cockpit.
My pilot was Lieutenant Christian Nobles, the Marine I had adopted as my private pilot. He wore combat armor. Once all the transports were docked, he would join in the fight. On missions like this, every man joined in the fighting …everyone but the sailors we brought to fly the barges. Marines are interchangeable parts. Flight crews are not.
We traded salutes, and I sat in the copilot’s chair. I sighed, and said, “Once more into the breach.”
Nobles said, “I saved your seat for you, sir; but I wasn’t sure you were coming. I thought maybe you forgot about me.”
Maybe Nobles thought I was invincible. He never complained when I dragged him into deadly situations. If he thought my invincibility would protect him as well, he’d never looked at my record and had no idea how many friends had died around me. If he’d known, he might not have been so confident.
Some pilots sit as still as statues while they wait to take off; Lieutenant Nobles was a tinkerer. As we waited for the outer hatch to open, he fiddled with the instrumentation around his seat. He checked dials and flipped switches. I tried to ignore him as he pulled out his M27, but ultimately asked, “When was the last time you stripped and oiled your piece?”
“Yesterday, sir,” he said.
“Can you think of any reason why you would have botched the job?”
“No, sir,” he said.
“Is there any reason why anyone would have specked with your weapon?”
“No, sir.”
“Have you dropped it in mud since you stripped it?”
“No, sir.”
“Were you drunk when you assembled it?”
“No, sir.”
“Then leave it alone,” I said.
“Aye, sir. Yes, sir.”
Nobles sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. A few seconds passed, and pretty soon, he was testing the controls again.
I received a message over my commandLink. “General, we are almost in place, sir. Fifty miles and closing.”
Outside the cruiser, the space around Mars was silent. Inside our transport, amber lights flashed and Klaxons tolled. In the last moment before we launched, the ship went silent. The outer hatch slid open, revealing a galaxy of stars and darkness. With a tap of our thrusters, Nobles lifted the transport off the sled and we glided into space.
By this time, we had circled Mars and come around to the side facing the sun. A dust-colored planet glowed below us, and I saw Mars Spaceport, a white-and-gray plateau that looked too large to be man-made. It formed a plain across a small corner of the planet’s surface.
And above the spaceport, moored in five razor-straight rows, were the barges we had come to collect. They did not look like ships. They looked like floating boxes.
“Listen up,” I said over the interLink, opening a channel that every man on every transport would hear, both sailors and Marines. “This is General Wayson Harris. I am personally overseeing this operation. You’ve all been briefed. You know your objectives.
“You know your assignments. Shoot anyone who gets in your way on this op. With all of the planets we need to evacuate, every one of these barges is worth millions of lives. We can’t afford to lose a single barge.” Even as I said it, I wondered how many other missions of mercy had begun with similar instructions—
“We don’t have time for mistakes or mercy on this one,” I said, and with that, I signed off.
No long motivational speech, no threats or cussing. Maybe I was getting soft.
It might have been that no one was guarding the barges, or it might have been that we caught them napping. The big ships remained stationary, silent, and dark as we sidled up beside them.
Seeing the mammoth barges from a lowly transport, I felt like a flea approaching a dog …no, an elephant. We
