Invasion Mars!
Kirov Series #73 carries the Earthforce Trilogy into Volume II
A sneak preview of Invasion Mars
Medusae Fossae
“Ice contains no future, just the past, sealed away. As if they're alive, everything in the world is sealed up inside, clear and distinct. Ice can preserve all kinds of things that way - cleanly, clearly. That's the essence of ice, the role it plays.”
―Haruki Murakami
Chapter 15 from Invasion Mars
They landed the next day on three shuttles as before. There were twenty Marines led by Troyak, all Black Death, and the ten engineers on Shuttle three. They put down very near the tent, but Fedorov saw that it had been flattened by the wind and storm while they were gone.
When they disembarked and reached the drilling site, it finally occurred to Fedorov that the canvass tent they had used to cover the drilling equipment could not be flat on the ground as it appeared. He was worried.
The Marines began pulling up the stakes and then they pulled the canvass aside. They noted there was a big gash in the canvass, and when they got it moved, the rig was gone! Fedorov stepped over to the hole they had drilled and peered down. He thought he saw something and activated his bright helmet light. Then took a photo that he could display on his faceplate and zoom in. There was no mistaking it now. The drill was deep in the 18 inch diameter hole, perhaps 150 feet down, and wedged against the ice. It looked like something had melted the ice around it, which then refroze to fix it tightly in place.
“How in the world did it get down there?” Fedorov said aloud, frustrated. Then he looked around and saw two of its metal legs still there on the surface, detached from the rig. This was nothing the wind could have done. It required the removal of two securing pins and bolts. There was only one answer. This had to be the work of the Kroth. They had obviously emerged from the cave site again, and investigated the drilling site under cover of the storm.
“Well,” he said to Troyak. “There goes nearly a week’s work on this site.” He had Byko look at the situation.
“Chief, is there any way we can get the rig out of that hole?”
“We could try lowering a sturdy cable with a hook and then set up a winch here to raise it up—that’s assuming we can hook the damn thing securely.”
“Then make it so, Chief. That’s expensive equipment, and it will take time to replace it—time we may not have.”
Fedorov started pacing, very concerned now. This was not a good start, and they desperately needed that drill, with its titanium and diamond tipped augur.
As he strode about, something arose in his unconscious mind. It was just a feeling, but something was wrong here. The sensation of alarm increased to a pulsing inner anxiety and adrenaline rush. What was wrong here?
His logical mind knew this site had been visited by the Kroth and sabotaged, but was wrecking the drill the full extent of what they did here? My God, he thought. What if they mined this area, knowing we would come back? What if there was a bomb here somewhere, just ready to go off and kill us all?
He found himself scanning the ground now for any sign that something might have been buried here. That was when he realized what was wrong.
There were no Krothi footprints, but he did not expect to find any. But there were clearly exposed ice sheets all around the site now. That, in and of itself was not surprising, but the whole area had been under a foot of sand and dust when they first arrived. They had to shovel it and sweep it away to expose the ice cap and begin their drilling operation.
The wind, his logical mind suggested, trying to still the sensation of fear rising from his deeper reptilian brain. The storm must have exposed all this ice, because there seemed no more and a couple inches of sand now over the covered areas. He was standing on ice, feeling the cold getting right through his boots. Remembering his arctic training, he now stepped off the ice onto a wash of sand. That was when it happened.
Fedorov heard a cracking sound, and it was coming from the ice. He noted there were places where the exposed ice looked to have been melted and refrozen, but now his attention was drawn to the ice near his feet. It started to steam, and then he saw and heard it bubbling and hissing.
The adrenaline that had already started in his system prompted him to back away from the scene. Now his logical mind joined the internal fracas and warned that this entire area might have been undermined by the Kroth with some thermal weapon. Was all this ice melting?
The Marines had been out on sand, in a circle around the bore hole, but now they also started pointing down at patches of exposed ice. Fedorov hit the Comms. “Major Troyak, is the ice stable near the shuttles?”
“I’ll check that, sir.”
Fedorov saw Troyak hastening towards the shuttles, but he was going to wish he was closer soon. He noted the hissing and bubbling was only happening at three places at intervals around the drill site. There could be thermal explosives at those points, intending to melt all the ice around the rig and completely collapse the bore hole. Then he looked more closely, the seething ice was clumping together, and it was starting to form larger lumps and heaps. He stooped to look closer right under his feet, where he saw something dark in the midst of a seething clump. Then he stood up and stepped back with alarm. There was no mistaking what he saw.
Troyak was on the Comms. “Captain sir, the ice near the shuttles is stable and solid.”
“Then get the Marines and engineers aboard. We need an emergency lift off. Now! He had seen the clumps of ice in a mulch, almost a liquid state, but not quite that thin. And the dark thing he had seen and stepped away from was the curve of a sickle claw! What was happening here?
As Fedorov ran, he noted that at three places, the melting ice had congealed into a growing shape, and there was no mistaking what it was forming. He saw the structure of a tentacle rear up like a cobra, the dark claw quivering menacingly at its end. Further down it connected to a shoulder that was now clearly extending into an arm. The Ice Men were there—right under the ice beneath the rig site, and they were starting to emerge, possibly burning their way up from below!
This was all his mind could surmise as he ran, narrowly missed by the sweeping tentacle he had seen. It wasn’t just the ordinary Ice Men they had fought many times. The things taking shape near the rig site were the demonic Bahadur!
He saw Troyak waving his men back to the shuttles and saw the engineers had also reached number three and were hurriedly boarding. He was closest to number one, Troyak’s shuttle, and reached it as the Major was herding the last of his ten-man squad aboard. He waited for Fedorov to get in through the aft cargo access, and then hit the button to close that ramp. Then Troyak was in through a side hatch, to get quickly into the pilot’s seat. The other two shuttles were already revving up for liftoff.
Troyak got himself strapped in and started flipping switches and feeding power to the engines. Seconds later they heard the whine of the ion thrusters and Troyak called back. “All hands to secured seats and strap in. We are leaving!”
Troyak fed power to the engines and the shuttle lifted off the ice. As it did so, and they rapidly gained some elevation, Fedorov took a deep breath. Troyak looked down and could not believe what he saw. There, standing in three places around the rig, were three of those demonic Bahadur. He hovered high above the site, and activated the minigun turret that was mounted below the shuttle’s nose. He used a joystick to move the cross hairs over one of the Kroth, and fired. The mini-gun was a super machine gun with rotating barrels that put out a tremendous number of rounds. He saw the fire just cut right through the closest Bahadur, severing his upper torso from the two legs until both body parts fell into a heap. Now he angled about to target another. Then he heard Fedorov on the Comms.
“Major, cease fire and get us up into space and headed back to Apollo.”
“Roger that, Captain, dusting off now.” He secured the mini-gun turret and fed power to the ionic lifters. The shuttle responded, quickly gaining elevation. There, far below on the ice, Troyak could seem many more places where the Kroth were erupting out of the ice sheet. He had an idea what they had done here, and would tell Fedorov about it when they reached Apollo.
For now, the rig site was ‘compromised,’ the drill 150 feet deep in that hole, and the entire site surrounded by a growing number of tentacled monsters from hell. He realized that they had just escaped a situation that could have seen them in a big fight down there, and he knew damn well that he would have brought back far fewer than the twenty men he had selected for this mission. The Kroth were all the Bahadur.
* * *
The Tharsis Highland was the home of most of the larger volcanos on Mars. This rocky, mountainous region saw the greatest volcanoes in the Solar system push their shield cones towards the stars. And of all, the undisputed master was Mount Olympus, Olympus Mons. Yet between those mighty dormant volcanoes on the Tharsis Highlands and the great and deep scar of Valles Marineris lay the most tortured region on Mars. It was called Noctis Labyrinthus, “The Labyrinth of Night,” a system of deeply folded intersecting valleys and small canyons all crowded together in an intricate and confounding maze that was just over 700 kilometers wide and over 400 kilometers north to south at its widest point. Without an accurate map or GPS navigation assistance you could get lost in that maze for weeks trying to find your way out. For a planet almost half the size of Earth, Mars never did anything small.
Fedorov had been reviewing satellite photos from Mars orbiters when he noticed something odd. The resolution wasn’t sharp enough to let him zoom in, but he thought he saw a sinuous column of some living, moving things in the heart of that Labyrinth. He checked subsequent images like an Astronomer trying to mark the progress of a newly discovered asteroid, and saw the same column had been moving west to east in the Labyrinth over three successive orbits. He took his data to Karpov.
“We may need some low-level Reconnaissance here,” he said, handing Karpov three images where he had circled the anomaly in red on each photo.
“What is it, Fedorov?”
“A question that needs an answer. My guess is that it’s the Kroth, because we certainly don’t have anything in the Labyrinth, and there’s nothing else alive down there but our people and the Kroth.”
“What a nightmarish terrain feature,” said Karpov. “No way I’m sending ground forces in on rovers. But we could overfly that area with fighters or shuttles.”
“Yes, but this is starting to add up. Isn’t it? We find the Kroth have hidden sleepers in Medusae Fossae, and now I spot a column that looked several kilometers long in the Labyrinth of Night.”
“That’s what they call that area? Spooky.”
“A minute ago, you said that a good assault rifle and an RPG-7 was a simple cure for spooky. Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me that they might be in there. That ground is deeply faulted, with hundreds of little canyons and gulches, and probably a good many caves. It may be another Trollswarren down there.”
“Troll’s warren?”
“Never mind. Just a place in a book I’ve been reading.”[1]
“You read too much, Fedorov.”
“How else do you expect me to learn anything?”
“Why there in that maze?” Karpov asked.
“Why not? it would be a perfect place to hide hidden nests of ground troops—difficult to access, and almost impossible to navigate unless you have a very good map, or flawless GPS. My guess is that they have bases in there, and we’re finding far too many regions of suspected Krothi activity on Mars. “
“In the Labyrinth of Night,” said Karpov. “Monsters emerge from hidden caves after sunset and march through those tortured canyons like wraiths. It would be hell if we had to put troops in there for recon, but I’ll have shuttle landers sweep over it the next few days to see if they can confirm your hunch.”
“If this new storm starts to migrate east to that area, they won’t see a thing.” Fedorov was a skeptic.
That night, Karpov’s words seemed to linger in Fedorov’s mind. He dreamed that he was lost in a confounding maze of stony canyons. The wind was up, the entire area washed by blowing sand and dust, but through occasional breaks in the clouds, he saw the utter darkness overhead, and the cold gleam of a few stars. He trudged along until, rounding a rocky edge of an outcrop of layered stone, he thought he saw shadows moving ahead. The Kroth, he thought. It can be nothing else.
Into his mind came a vision of a long column of phantoms, nearly invisible in the storm. Their transparent bodies had been covered with red blowing dust, and they moved with an evil determination and disregard for the conditions on the ground. He shrunk into a shadowed nook, realizing that the column was coming his way. There, he huddled in that sliver of darkness as ten, then twenty, then a hundred tall Krothi warriors moved past his position.
Frozen with fear, he even stilled his breath so he would not be seen. There were nightmares afoot in Noctis Labyrinthus; real demons on the march. If any one of them were to turn its head and look down, they might discover him, tear open his EVA suit and see him suffer a hideous death, his head lopped off to become the trophy of some ghastly tentacled thing from another world.
Just as the column ended, the last of the Kroth stopped, turning its head this way and that. He heard a dark, simpering sound, and saw the restless movement of tentacles. A terrible fear possessed him. It was as if the Kroth could sense his fear. Fedorov’s pulse was up and his heart raced. The howl of the Martian wind stirred his alarm higher, a vortex of terror swept over him, and the Bahadur slowly turned and looked down at him cowering on the shadows. For one moment of horror, he saw the alien’s eyes, and then he screamed.
He awoke in the darkness of his quarters, his heart pounding, sweat on his brow, and his breath coming fast. It was a dream, he finally realized. Only a dream. Yet in that horrid last moment he had anticipated the fear and fate of anyone else he might have to ask to actually go there to that blighted maze and walk in the Labyrinth of Night.
[1] Trollswarren, also known as “The Halls of Krandurben” is a subterranean region in my Military Fantasy series The Chronicles of Innisfail. Fedorov has been reading it of late and he actually emailed me with questions last week!