Olympus Mons, the biggest volcano in the solar system, rises twenty-one kilometers from the datum, three times the elevation of Everest, on Earth, and fully twice the height of the volcano Mauna Kea as measured from the ocean floor. I was skimming across the six nested calderas at the summit now, the rocky crater floor a scant couple of kilometers beneath my fast-falling pod. The calderas’ interior deeps were still lost in midnight shadow, but the eastern escarpment, seemingly suspended in a mass of wispy white clouds, caught the light of the shrunken rising sun, and from my vantage point it looked like those vertical rock cliffs were about to scrape the nanomatrix from my pod’s belly. In another moment, however, the escarpment was past, the 80-kilometer-wide caldera dropping behind with startling speed.
The plan, I’d known all along, was to skim just above the volcanic summit, a simple means of foxing enemy radar, but I’d not been ready for the visual reality of that near miss. My pod was totally under AI control, of course, the sentient software flexing my delta wings in rapid shifts far too fast for a mere human brain to follow. The pilot was taking me lower still, until the escarpments behind loomed above, rather than below.
Olympus Mons is huge, covering an area about the size of the state of Arizona, and that means it’s also flat, despite the summit’s dizzying altitude. The average slope is only about five degrees, and you can be standing halfway up the side of the mountain and not even be aware of it.
The slope was enough, though, that it put the bulk of Mount Olympus behind us, helping to shield us from enemy sensors ahead as we glided into the final phase of our descent. The active nano coating on the hulls of our pods drank radar, visible light—everything up through hard X-rays—giving us what amounted to invisibility. But no defense is perfect. If the enemy had known what he was doing, he’d have had whole sensory array farms across the mountain’s broad summit—not to mention point-defense lasers and antiship CPB batteries.
Hell, maybe they did and we were already dead in their crosshairs. My sensors weren’t picking up any hostile interest, though. I wished I could talk to the others, compare technical notes, but Captain Reichert would have burned me out of the sky himself for breaking comm silence.
Follow the download. Ride your pod down. Leave the thinking to the AIs. They know a hell of a lot more about it than you do.
Two hundred kilometers farther, and the base escarpment of Olympus Mons, a sheer five-kilometer cliff, slipped past in the darkness. Across the Tharsis bulge now, still descending, beginning a shuddering weave through the predawn sky to bleed off my remaining speed. The three-in-a-row volcanoes of the Tharsis Montes complex slid past. Then the Tharsis highlands gave way to the broken and chaotic terrain of the Noctis Labyrinthus, a twelve-hundred-kilometer stretch of badlands where we did not want to touch down under any stretch of the imagination. I swept into the local dawn, the sun coming up directly ahead with the abruptness of a thermonuclear blast, but in total silence.
“Landing deployment in twenty seconds,” the sexy voice told me.
“Great. Any sign of bad guys picking us up?”
“Negative on hostile activity. Military frequency signals from objective appear to be normal traffic.”
“That,” I told her, “is the sweetest news I’ve heard all morning.”
Download
Mission Profile: Ocher Sands
Operation Damascus Steel/OPPLAN#5735/15NOV2245
[extract]
… while Second Platoon will deploy by squad via Cutlass TAV/AIP to LZ Damascus Blue, location 12o 26’ S, 87o 55’ W, in the Sinai Planum. Upon landing, squads will form up individually and move on assigned objectives utilizing jumpjets. Units will be under Level-3 communications silence, and will if possible avoid enemy surveillance.
Second Platoon Objective is Base Schiaparelli, located on the Ius Chasma, coordinates 7o 19’ 30.66”, 87o 50’ 46.40” W …
The Black Wizards’ LZ was on the Sinai Planum, south of Ius Chasma, some 3,500 kilometers southeast of the summit of Olympus Mons. This was the scary part, the part where everything could go pear-shaped in a big hurry if the bastard god Murphy decided to favor me with His omnipotent and manifold blessings. “Double-check me,” I told her as I ran through the final checklist.
I saw green across the board projected in my mind.
“All CA systems appear functional,” the voice told me. She hesitated, then added, “Good luck, Petty Officer Carlyle.”
And what, I wondered, did an AI know about luck? “Thanks, girlfriend,” I muttered out loud. “Whatcha doing after the war, anyway?”
“I do not understand your question.”
“Ah, it would never work anyway, you and me,” I told her, and I waited for her to dump me.
Half a kilometer above the red-ocher desert floor, my AIP-81 insertion pod peeled open beneath and around me as if at the tug of a giant zipper, and abruptly I was in the open air and falling toward the Martian surface.
But not far. The delta-winged pod continued to open somewhere above me, unfolding into an improbably large triangular airfoil attached by buckyweave rigging and harness to my combat armor. The jolt when the wing deployed fully felt like it was going to yank me back into orbit. The ground was rushing past, and up, at a sickening pace, and I resisted the urge to crawl up the rigging to escape the blur of rock and sand.
Then the autorelease fired and the harness evaporated. My backpack jets kicked in, the blast shrill and almost inaudible in the thin atmosphere, kicking up a swirl of pale dust beneath my boots as they dropped to meet their up-rushing shadows.
I hit as I’d been trained, letting the armor take the jolt, relaxing my knees, letting myself crumple with the impact.
And I was down.
Down and safe, at least for the moment. My suit showed full airtight integrity, I couldn’t feel any pain, no broken bones or sprains or strains from an awkward landing. I stood up, just a little shaky on my feet, and took in the broad expanse of the Martian landscape, brown and rust-ocher sand and gravel beneath a vast and deep mid-morning sky, ultramarine above, pink toward the horizon.
I was alone. Even my girlfriend was gone, the circuitry that had maintained her abbreviated personality nano-D’ed into microscopic dust.
Well, not entirely alone. Somewhere out there in all that emptiness were forty-seven men and women, the rest of my Marine insertion platoon.
First things first. Navy Hospital Corpsmen are the combat medics of the Marine Corps, but our technical training makes us the sci-techs of Marine advance ops as well. Planetology, local biology and ecosphere dynamics, atmosphere chemistry—I was responsible for all of it on this mission, at least so far as Squad Bravo was concerned.
I knew what the answers would be. This was Mars, after all, and humans had been living here for a couple of centuries, now. But I drew a test sample into my ES-80 sniffer and ran the numbers anyway. Do it by the download.
Carbon dioxide, 95 percent, with 2.7 percent nitrogen, 1.6 percent argon, and a smattering of other molecular components, all at 600 pascals, which is less than one percent of the surface atmospheric pressure on Earth. Temperature a brisk minus 60 degrees Celsius. Exotic parabiochemistries powered by the unfiltered UV from the distant sun. Thirty parts per billion of methane and 130 ppb of formaldehyde—that was from the microscopic native critters living at the lower permafrost boundaries underground, the reason we’d abandoned plans to terraform the place. Gotta keep Mars safe and pristine for the alien wee beasties, after all.
I