Toll Seven halted and his silver eyeballs swiveled in their plastic sockets. Reminiscing would not improve his efficiency. He must concentrate and extract every ounce of effort from himself during these critical weeks.
Against the Highborn—
Toll Seven longed to plug into Web-Mind and reconfigure the statistics one more time. He would have to use the half-cyborgs, the ones converted in his command pod. It was yet another risk in this daring stab for Solar System-wide conquest. With three Doom Stars approaching, the odds were 62.34 percent in cyborg favor.
Those odds would fall fifteen points, however, if the bio-forms of the Battlefleet discovered that key Homo sapiens had been jacked into the Web-Mind. If only he could capture Commissar Kursk or even better, Commodore Blackstone. The time might come, but so far, they had each proved too cautious by training or by instinct. They would soon make an error, however, for that was the way of free bio-forms. Once he gained control over those two, the odds for space-battle victory would increase another 3.22 percentage points.
-4-
Marten Kluge felt trapped and was depressed, as if he had never escaped out of the punishment tube in Sydney, Australian Sector. It felt as if the blue water still gushed over his head as he pumped and pumped the red handle.
He had lived as a meaningless cipher in an underground megalopolis on Earth. Now he lived again in a sprawling subterranean city, but this time on Mars. Only this time the city was a titanic slum compared to Sydney.
A little over three weeks ago, they had skimmed from Olympus Mons and had made it to New Tijuana, 343 kilometers away. That was much too near the giant volcano, too near the terrifying nest of cyborgs.
Marten tightened his back muscles so they wouldn’t quiver. He and Omi were in an underground firing-range, practicing with genuine Gauss needlers. Others of his commando troop practiced here. Secretary-General Chavez had given him permanent command of them.
Marten hefted what Major Diaz had called ‘a combat needler.’ It was bulky, but light. He suspected it would prove useless against cyborgs or against battle-armored drop-troops. Marten settled a pair of goggles over his eyes, lifted the needler and sighted the human-shaped target one hundred feet away. He fired a burst, listening to the cracks of noise and listening to all the other cracks from the other compartmentalized lanes. The hit area glowed red, showing dots on the target’s forehead.
“Let me try,” Omi said.
With his thumb, Marten flicked the safety, set down the weapon and stepped back. Omi picked it up and fired burst after burst. The glows showed in the head, the chest and in the genital area. When the needler clicked empty, Omi slammed in another clip and methodically emptied it, too. He picked up a third clip.
“That will do for now,” Marten said, putting a hand on Omi’s shoulder.
Omi whirled around, and there was something dangerous in his dark eyes. That something settled down as Omi seemed to realize who touched him and where he was.
“It’s getting to you, too, eh?” Marten asked.
Omi took a deeper breath than normal and gave a minimal shrug. “Is this why we escaped the Highborn?”
“Meaning?”
“To die on Mars?” Omi asked. “It’s only a matter of time before they unleash those cyborgs on us.”
“Right,” Marten said. It was as if Omi’s words had flipped a switch in him. Marten knew what he had to do. He’d been playing the long shot for a long time now. Until they were free of the Inner Planets, there was no sense in trying to play it safe.
“You’ve finally thought of something,” Omi said.
“What gives you that idea?”
Omi made a softly deprecating noise. “I’ve seen that look on your face before. You’re psyching up to charge through a wall. But whatever you’re planning, I’m in.”
“Good,” Marten said. “I’m going to have a word with Major Diaz. Then we’re off to see Chavez.”
Major Diaz continued running the commando troop through the target-practicing drills. In the lobby, Marten and Omi donned bulky spylo-jackets and hurried onto the cold street.
There were on the tenth city-level of New Tijuana. Instead of high-arching levels with bright sunlamps and well-modulated temperatures like Sydney, the Martian city had a claustrophobically low ceiling a mere twenty feet high. Many of the glass buildings reached that high, making it seem even more cramped. Instead of sunlamps on the ceiling to simulate sunlight, streetlamps provided dim lighting. Worst of all, both men could see their breath as the cold seeped into their bones.
Martian children ran screaming past. They wore sythi-woolen caps, spylo jackets and ragged shoes. They chased a bouncing ball, and theirs were the only bright faces. The adults all looked haggard, were amazingly thin and moved with slouched shoulders. They all shuffled out of Marten’s way and avoided making eye-contact, treating him as if he were some escaped beast.
Omi had complained before that wherever he went, he felt eyes staring into his back like needles.
The Red Planet was closer to Luna’s density than to Earth’s density. What it came down to was that Mars lacked a large, molten core like the Earth. It also lacked the richness in metallic ores. Although it was a shorter distance to drill a deep-core mine here, the type of planetary mantle and other factors had mandated against planet-deep drilling. Too, the Social Unity government had never granted the necessary funds for such work. Thus, the Martian cities used nuclear fusion plants to power everything. That meant they needed sufficient fissionable ores to feed the hungry reactors. That meant mines and in the past, it had meant importing massively from the Jupiter Confederation. Mars also lacked sufficient water. The Jupiter cartels and the Martian Water Corporation had combined to scour the Jupiter System for ice asteroids and to import from Saturn. Saturn’s rings contained a treasure in movable ice, one that had been mined for decades.
These and other factors had contributed to Martian squalor, at least in Earth terms. Marten felt constricted in New Tijuana and at times found it difficult to breathe. Until reaching New Tijuana, Marten and Omi had received a false impression about Mars. As Marten had said, “We only saw the best, the military people and the defense facilities.”
With fusion plants instead of deep-core mines, the need to import water and the struggling food domes, the Martian economy wavered on permanent disaster. Likely, the constant rebellion had heavily contributed to that. Too many glass buildings in New Tijuana had blast holes that had never been repaired.
“I’d hate to see the slums here,” Omi had said their first day down.
“Mars is the slum of Inner Planets,” had been Marten’s observation.
The two ex-shock troopers now showed their special passes to the elevator police and rode a lift up two levels. Then the lift stopped and police in black-visored helmets asked them to step out. Levels one through seven were the best lit and the best heated. They contained the government buildings and the homes for the highest ranked in the Planetary Union.
Only after placing a call through to the Secretary-General’s office did the police grudgingly let them enter the prized levels.
Marten might have grumbled to Omi about it, but both of them knew the lifts were monitored. They knew because Major Diaz had warned them about it. Soon, the two hurried down a cleaner street. And here, all the broken streetlamps and buildings had been fixed. In time, Marten and Omi waited in a plush office, each half- sunken in a soft chair.
A little over three weeks ago, they had fled from Olympus Mons with the cyborg in their skimmer. None of them had trusted her, if such a thing could be called female. Marten had used several opportunities to talk with Osadar Di. The one fact that had stuck in his mind was that originally she had been from the Jupiter System. She
