The Complete Heritage Trilogy: Semper Mars, Luna Marine, Europa Strike. Ian DouglasЧитать онлайн книгу.
with a laugh, but the spycams had him worried. There weren’t many places in the empty hab to hide even cameras as small as these, but there could well be listening devices scattered all over the place; there were remote mikes as small as the head of a pin that would be impossible to discover without going over every square centimeter of all three rooms, walls, ceilings, and floors, with a magnifying glass.
After the bug sweep, Garroway had ordered an inventory taken of everything that might be of use in the hab…including anything that the Marines had managed to sneak in with them from Cydonia. He’d used hand signs, though, to indicate that only routine items like food or clothing were to be announced out loud. Everyone in the hab was aware that there were probably uninvited listeners.
Then he’d called the meeting of his senior staff, gathering them close around the plastic table where the secret inventory could be laid out and discussed. He was pretty sure there were no hidden cameras close enough to the center of the big room that hidden watchers would be able to see anything significant; there could be microphones in the deck under their feet, of course, but if they spoke indirectly, and in low-voiced whispers, where necessary, they could avoid giving too much away. Just to be on the safe side, he’d ordered the other Marines to walk around the inside of the hab, circling the seven at the table set up in the middle, talking loudly, swearing, laughing, or just plain scuffing their feet, making noise enough to drown out the whispers completely over a range of more than a meter or two.
Eighteen Marines could make one hell of a sonic scrambler when they put their minds to it.
The staff meeting included Dr. Alexander, the senior civilian scientist present. Besides Lieutenant King, the only other officer in the little band, he’d brought in his senior NCOs, Gunnery Sergeant Harold Knox and Sergeant Ellen Caswell, from First Section, and Staff Sergeant Kathryn Ostrowsky and Sergeant Ken Jacob from Second Section. He’d learned a long, long time ago that the real strength of the Corps was its noncoms…the experienced men and women who knew what needed to be done and how best to do it.
“Hell,” Garroway said, his voice low. The others leaned close to catch his words against the noisy background. “I don’t even know how many stations there are. Narrowing the choice down could be a bitch.”
“There are twelve,” Alexander told him. “Bradbury. Bova. Burroughs. Bear. Lots of ‘Bs.’ Clarke. Heinlein. Asimov. I don’t remember the others. They’re unmanned most of the time.”
“How do you know all of that?” Ostrowsky wanted to know.
Alexander shrugged. “We had to familiarize ourselves with the remote hab facilities. They were originally set up to allow small teams of geologists, paleontologists, and archeologists to work in the field for extended periods of time.”
“I’m beginning to think the MMEF should have had a similar briefing,” Garroway said. “The question, then, is which one we’re at now.”
“We’re close to the equator,” Alexander put in. “That ought to narrow our selection down a bit, too.”
“At the equator, huh?” King said. “Can you be sure about that?”
“I happened to look up,” Alexander replied. “One of the moons—Deimos, the one like a bright star—was almost directly overhead.”
“Good point,” Garroway said. “That tallies with how long our flight took, and the fact that I’m pretty sure we were going southwest. And those cliffs we saw outside suggest the Valles Marineris, too. That runs right along the equator. We could be inside the canyon chain, somewhere.”
“Hell, Valles Marineris is, what?” Caswell said. “Three thousand miles long? That’s only as long as the United States is wide! We could be as far from Mars Prime as San Diego is from Washington!”
“No, we’re close enough to Candor Chasma that the Mars cat could drive out here inside of a couple of days,” Ostrowsky pointed out. “They couldn’t have had more warning than that. That rules out the distant stations, like the one at Noctis Labyrinthus.”
“That one’s Bradbury Station,” Alexander put in. “You know, I’d need a survey map to be certain, but I’d be willing to bet we’re at Heinlein Station.”
“Yeah?” Knox asked. “So where’s that?”
“Damn, I don’t have my wrist-top or PAD,” Alexander said. “I really need something to draw on.”
“Will this do?” Ostrowsky asked. She slid a pad of paper and a pen across the tabletop. “Found ’em in the stores.”
“Good enough.” Alexander began sketching quickly. “Okay, here’s the widest part of the whole Valles Marineris. We’ve got three big, oval-shaped, east-west canyons stacked north to south, small to large, like this. Ophir Chasma up here. Candor in the middle. Melas to the south.
“To the west, we have two long, skinny canyons running in straight, east-west lines, like this. Ius Chasma comes into Melas Chasma, here. And Tithonium Chasma comes into Candor Chasma, so. Mars Prime is located on the Candor Mensa—a mensa is a kind of a plateau, flat-topped—smack in the middle of Candor Chasma, about here.
“Now, we’ve got several stations and outposts scattered around here, but the fact that we’re on a canyon floor, and the canyon isn’t all that wide—less than fifty kilometers is my guess—makes me think we’re in Tithonium.” He marked a spot in the northern of the two slender canyons west of Candor on the map. “Heinlein Station. I don’t know much about it, except that it’s supposed to be a single hab, and it was used by an areological team five years ago when they were surveying this part of the Valles. It’s about 650 kilometers west of Candor Chasma.”
King gave a low whistle. “That’s almost four hundred miles. We can’t do that on foot, that’s for sure.”
“No,” Garroway agreed. “We’re going to have to borrow that UN cat out there.”
“You know, if we’re that close,” Knox said, “then we can probably figure our friends outside aren’t going to stay there for the next three months, y’know? They wouldn’t have enough supplies in that cat to last ’em that long.”
“Shit,” Ostrowsky put in. “Can you imagine sitting in a cat for that long, just watching POWs? Talk about the cat watching the mousehole. Not my idea of soft duty!”
“Right,” Garroway said. “Their orders are probably to stay put and keep an eye on us until they know we’re not going to cause any trouble. If we haven’t tried anything in, oh, a week or so, they’ll likely pull out and make tracks for Mars Prime.”
“They might pop back in every once in a while to check up on us,” Knox added. “Or maybe Bergerac has arranged to have another cat come out here every few days or so and change the guard.”
“That would make sense. If it wasn’t tying up too many of their assets.”
“So what are we gonna do about it, Major?” Ostrowsky asked. “Sit here like good little POWs until they decide to let us go?”
Garroway had already given the problem considerable thought. “Our mission orders don’t quite cover this situation,” he said slowly. “But I do know that we still answer to the people who cut our orders Earthside…and we’re not fulfilling our part of the bargain by sitting here on our duffs doing what the UN tells us to do.” He looked at each of the others at the table in turn, measuring them. “We’re supposed to be safeguarding American interests here. Well, it seems to me those interests are under attack, and it’s our duty to fight back.”
“Fight back,” Alexander said. He shook his head. “Damn, Major, I don’t see how you can even think about that. We have no idea where we are, we have no weapons, and we can’t call for help. Sounds impossible.”
“No,” Garroway said. “It sounds like a challenge.”
He still wasn’t sure what they should do, what they could do, when it came to that. He was just beginning