Sneak Preview: Earthforce Mars

Kirov Series takes its boldest evolution yet! -

The Kirov Saga has been everywhere, seeing action in both of the world wars and several versions of a third. The core characters have been to the deep past and the distant future, but with the release of Encore, they faced one of their most sinister foes yet, entities they came to call “the Ice Men.”

First discovered in an Ice cave in Antarctica, Fedorov and Karpov find a bona fide Alien, an da nasty one at that. in Encore, they used their Kamenski Device and a clever plan to frustrate an invasion of Earth by these beings, now, Director Kamenski has recruited them again, and after an interesting mission to divert threatening asteroids in Goliath, Volume #71 is following that up with a whirlwind tour of the Solar system with Karpov leading out an Earthforce Squadron. His first stop—the red planet Mars, where he aims to root out any hidden cadres or bases the Ice men might have there, (now known to be called the Kroth.)

Here’s a slice of that pie, when Troyak leads a ten man squad of Marines down to the MacMurdo of Mars, a base called Darwin Station.

“Aim for the head. Keep automatic weapon’s fire on them, even if it doesn’t do shit when they’re shielded. Watch out for their plasma weapons and sticky bombs, use your knives up close, with steady pressure, and don’t ever look them in the eye.”  —Major Kandemir Troyak

That was how you fight the Kroth on the ground in a nutshell, and the Marines had learned those tactics the hard way, by facing and fighting them numerous times. Now they were going after them again, at a place called Darwin Station on Mars….

It was cold, the venting system expelling the carbon dioxide exhaled by the men sent small vaporous emissions up from the back of their armored helmets. Mars could get down to a bone-shattering –238 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, but here it was just -180 at that moment, though they could feel that chill just beyond the outer barrier of their EVA suits. It seemed a jealous thing, wanting to devour and extinguish the heat and warmth of their bodies. Troyak wondered how the Ice Men survived in it without freezing solid, and he knew his own men could not survive five minutes in that cold if they lost suit integrity. That made close in fighting dangerous. The Kroth had very sharp claws.

They had all trained for this in the dry inland valleys of Antarctica, and there it had been no more than -80 below zero. Here it was a hundred degrees colder. For all of them, it was a strange feeling to know that you were walking on a world that would take your life in minutes should you ever be exposed to it. There was a sadness in thinking that you would never bask in the sun on a Martian summer’s day, wiggling your toes in the red silt and dust. Nor would you ever touch it with your bare hands. You could only look at it, and see the ancient rocks and weathered landforms, like yardangs, casting deep velvety shadows.

“Alright,” said Troyak, “fan out and post flankers. Zykov, get up on something high on overwatch with your Simonov. I’m taking point with Blok.”

“Roger that,” said Zykov, still not knowing anything of the fate he had suffered on the mission into Goliath. One night he had dreamed something close. His body was still tingling as from a sudden electric shock, and in front of him he saw an enormous Ice Man, towering head and shoulders above him. But he had his Simonov, and with fixed bayonet, and he gave it to the thing, seeing its bulbous eyes widen in reaction, feeling the enmity and raw hate behind them. The he felt something on his shoulder, like a sharp clawed vise with its strength, and his head’s up display quickly alerted him to four suit punctures in flashing red text. They winked on an off, then slowly went green and then vanished. In their place was a single line of text: “Suit integrity restored.” But Zykov felt an unaccountable icy numbness in his left shoulder and upper arm. Then he woke up. Now he was alert and on mission, his mind no longer in his thoughts, but with his senses. Whenever you were doing something dangerous, that was where you should be—even while driving fast on a freeway. Stay in your senses; don’t think about anything else.

Zykov looked around, and saw a ladder up to the top of the rover dock entry area, and thought that might make a good sniper perch up there. He was taking in the amber red light, the play of light and shadow on the land around them. The movement of blowing sand and dust on the horizon, and he was hearing the steady moan of the cold, cold wind. Then he moved, cat-like and ran at a low crouch to reach the ladder near the rover lock entry. He shifted the long barreled Simonov to his right shoulder by the strap, and climbed.

He reached the top in five steps and lay prone on a slightly curved roof. His booted feet were just a little lower then his belt line. Then he unshouldered the Simonov, checked the clip was in position and fitted securely, and removed the safety. He was soon all business, sighting through the scope briefly at anything that might offer an enemy cover ahead as the Marines advanced. At this point, no one even knew whether the Ice Men were even there, but if they were, Zykov would be the first to see them. He pinched off his collar microphone.

“Overwatch in position, Sarge, looks clear up to outer entry on the closest Dome. Be advised, that hatch looks open….”

“Roger that,” came the voice of Troyak through his helmet speakers.

Troyak looked over his right shoulder to see where his Marines were. He pointed to one and gestured that he should swing around the right side of the circular dome. Slowly the main body of the squad closed behind Troyak and Blok. Zykov’s warning was correct, the hatch was open, the door ajar, creaking on its metal hinges occasionally when the wind moved it. It was as eerie a scene as any of them could imagine, the wan red light, the moaning wind, the cold. Troyak pointed to Blok for him to take position on the other side of the hatch. Then he gave a palm down signal to the next two men, who both dropped to one knee, and leveled their assault rifles at the portal.

They could see a small chamber, a typical airlock, with another hatch ajar on the far wall. Troyak waved the way and they moved inside the lock chamber. Beyond the open inner hatch there was complete darkness.

Troyak knew he could have no element of surprise here. His instinct was to just toss in a grenade and make an assault entry, but what if there were people in there? So instead he tossed in a light stick, to roll back the shadows in the room beyond the hatch. He toggled a switch on the right side of his helmet and then spoke in a loud voice that would be amplified and broadcast from a small speaker on the top of the helmet.

“Earthforce Marines!” he said boldly, broadcasting on his external helmet speaker. “Anyone inside, either sound off now, or get to cover. Grenades come next.”

There was no reply.

So Troyak unclipped a grenade from his hip beltline, and tossed it through the yawning portal. It was a flash-bang assault grenade, meant to startle and confuse more than kill. Then he and Blok lunged through the opening. They saw nothing threatening, but there were bodies on the deck. Troyak looked around, scanning the shadows on night vision.

They were in a small workshop, and there had been a fight here. The maintenance crew of three men had fought. He saw an axe clutched by one man, and the other holding a battery operated drill with a quarter inch bit. The third held a hammer in one fist, a crowbar in the other. They fought, with thick heavy wrenches, crow bars, hammers, drills and saws, but they died. The three bodies were now piled atop one another, and beneath them all, Troyak caught the translucent gleam that he could not now mistake for anything else. He swung his machine pistol around to cover it, and pulled out his long military knife.

Nothing moved. It was cold and silent, with even the wind muted inside the shop.

“Three bodies,” said Troyak, “but there’s a problem. Look beneath them. Blok, be careful now, and see if you can pull that top body off the pile. I’ll cover you. Watch your legs and ankles. That’s it, just lean in and get him by the arm.”

As Blok took hold and pulled, the hammer in the man’s band slipped and clattered onto the floor. Troyak kept scanning the shadows on night vision, his gaze shifting from one corner of the room and then back to the thing under the bodies.

Blok had hold of the man’s arm. The victim wore a grimy set of overalls. Then he saw his face and stepped back, aghast.

They three men had planned on fighting, tools in hand, seeing what was in the air lock chamber through the thick glass port on the inner hatch, until the hatch suddenly opened and the entire room lost pressure with a sudden hiss. The maintenance crew had no suits on, because the base had been taken by surprise. They were down in half a minute, gasping, their eyes bulging, the veins on their foreheads thick with boiling blood. The face Blok saw was a contorted mess, with one eye half way out of its socket. The Ice Men didn’t have to kill them. They were dead within two minutes.

But what about the thing below them? How could they have killed that one? Troyak looked the scene over, then realized—they didn’t kill it. They would have been completely incapacitated when that hatch opened and the shop lost pressure. This Ice Man died elsewhere, he realized, and the bodies were piled here later. Looking more closely he could now see gelatinous goo seeping from several puncture wounds in the abdomen of the Ice Man on the bottom.

Then he realized that the bottom maintenance worker and the Ice Man were in a lurid mess, with parts of their bodies melded together as one. The human’s leg was strangely different, glassy, as if it was slowly changing, its tissue altered to the same gel like substance that was within the Ice Men. He remembered what Karpov had told him. The Ice Men didn’t reproduce, but they could convert the flesh of other living things to their own. They preyed upon others to make zombie versions of themselves, like a virus. That’s what was going to happen to Zykov before they back-shifted to save him. The scene was repulsive, but Troyak was back to searching the deeper recesses of the shop, his mind refocused sharply on the mission at hand. He saw another hatch on the far wall.

Now he waved three more Marines into the shop. Blok was trying to move another body.

“Leave them, Blok. Let’s move forward and continue the sweep. Stay alert men. Cover every angle.”

The next hatch was also ajar, and Troyak realized the Ice Men had deliberately opened the space to destroy the interior environment of the complex. They knew the humans needed to bring their own environment with them, so their means of attack was to destroy that safe habitat first. He searched the workshop, found some kerosene, and thought to burn those bodies. He knew they had been piled together that way for a very dark reason, and he wasn’t going to see that pile spawn four more Ice Men. Then he remembered a briefing—you couldn’t start a fire on Mars. The atmosphere was just too thin, and mostly carbon dioxide. There wasn’t enough oxygen to sustain open flames.

So they found some kerosene in the workshop and drenched the bodies, then Troyak shooed the Marines outside and closed both hatches. He found a valve that would feed an oxygen rich atmosphere into the shop, set a small thermal charge on a short timer, and then left.

They would continue their sweep, but found no more bodies. None of the science team members were there, living or dead, and they certainly were not buried out there in the Martian soil. But what they did find was a logbook detailing activities and discoveries made here by these men and women, and it would be quite revealing.

That’s just one of many missions and battles against the Ice Men, on Mars, and all through the solar system, from Jupiter, to Saturn, to the outer limits again beyond Neptune. Kamenski had nailed the date the main Kroth fleet arrives from Tau Ceti, and earth has had 100 years to prepare. That gave birth to Earthforce, a defensive fleet of warships placed under the command of Vladimir Karpov, who now has a war on his hands unlike any he has ever fought. This startling evolution of the Kirov Saga now serves up riveting military science fiction.

Don’t dare miss Earthforce Mars, coming soon!