“Does the polarizing lens still work?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said placing the helmet over my head. The nonfunctioning interLink turned the inside of my helmet into an echo chamber. Using a few optical commands, I ran a diagnostic. “It works,” I said, removing the helmet again.
No sooner had I said this than the strange flying animal that had distracted the trackers popped up from behind the far wall of the base. It skirted the top of the wall and dropped to the ground, traveling through the swamp and reeds. Only it wasn’t an animal. It was a service drone that Freeman controlled with a small remote.
Dragging a ten-foot train of shimmering brown cloth behind it, the drone snaked toward us and stopped. Freeman unclipped the thermal blanket he had tied around it and attached a thin silver disc. “You’ll want to cover your eyes in a moment,” Freeman said.
Replacing my helmet, I watched the little drone pick its way through the debris that had once been the outpost’s massive front wall. The drone zigged around broken pillars and scrambled through a large pipe. It disappeared behind the wall, but I could still see it on Freeman’s readout as it approached the terrorists’ bunker.
If Crowley’s men saw it coming, they didn’t seem to care. When the drone got within fifty feet of their location, the little sphere exploded in a chemical flash so bright that it drowned out the desert sun.
“Go!” Freeman yelled, and he slapped my helmet to make sure that I had heard him.
Even looking through polarizing lenses, I could barely see. The Gobi landscape looked faded and white. I felt as if I had been staring into the sun. Running half-blind, I did not see the knee-high ridge left from the broken wall. The toe of my boot jammed into the remains of a heavy sandstone block, and I lurched forward but managed to regain my balance without falling.
Over the top of the sand dune I saw three of Crowley’s men squirming on the ground rubbing their eyes with both hands. One of the men heard me coming and patted the ground around him until he found a gun. He squinted as he aimed at the sound of my footfalls. I squeezed off two rounds hitting him in the face and chest. One of his friends screamed, “What happened?” I shot him and the other man.
Two of Crowley’s soldiers had seen the drone coming and shielded their eyes at the last moment. They had sprung from their hiding place and chased Ray Freeman as he ran toward his ship. Taking less than a second to aim, I hit one of them in the shoulder from over a hundred yards away. He spun and fell. His friend skidded to a stop and turned to look for me. I fired a shot, hitting him in the face.
Freeman’s ship must not have been hidden very far away. Moments after he disappeared over the edge of the canyon, a small spaceworthy flier that looked like a cross between a bomber and transport rose into the air. Unlike the barge that Freeman had used as a decoy, the ship was immaculate, with rows of dull white armor lining its bulky, oblong hull. Gun and missile arrays studded its wings. From where I stood, I had a clear view of the cockpit, but the glass was mirror-tinted and I could not see in. The ship hovered over me for a few moments, then launched across the desert in the direction of Morrowtown.
At first I thought Freeman had abandoned the base, but then he doubled back toward the barracks. I could see some of the guns along the wings glinting as I ran to view the fight. There was no hurry, however. Crowley’s men were not prepared to fight a ship like Freeman’s.
Its titanium-barreled chain guns made one continuous flash as they spent hundreds of bullets per second. Some of the guerillas tried to escape, but there was no escape, not from Freeman. Two men lunged into an armored truck. Before they could get the vehicle moving, he fired a missile that reduced it to flames and twisted metal. Freeman sprayed a dune with that chain gun, churning up sprays of blood and sand. When he finished, shreds of smoldering cloth floated in the air like autumn leaves. The only man left standing was Kline.
“Bastards!” Kline shrieked in his thick accent as I approached him. “You bastards! Are you going to kill me, too?”
Kline still cradled the grenade with both hands. His clothes were spattered and dripping with blood, none of it his own. He looked down at the pulverized remains of his allies. “Oh…goddamn…” he muttered.
Freeman hovered over the dune and landed his ship in a rippling heat cloud. He climbed out and came over to inspect his work. In the distance, Godfrey emerged from the barracks and started toward us.
Freeman stared at Kline with disgust. “Go,” he said.
Kline looked down at his hand, then held the grenade out for Freeman. “Please?”
“Keep it,” Freeman said. He turned his back on Kline and walked away. Kline cradled the grenade against his chest as he staggered into the desert. I didn’t know if he would die of thirst or be blown to pieces, and I tried not to care. That useless moron had tried to sell my platoon for the slaughter, I told myself. But when he paused and looked back in what seemed like a plea for help, I felt a sharp pang of guilt. A moment later, he disappeared over a dune.
Any sympathy I might have felt for Kline disappeared when Godfrey uncovered a stockpile of gas canisters. Hoping to kill the platoon and leave the weapons intact, Crowley had brought three canisters of Noxium gas. Once he’d herded the Marines back into the barracks, he must have planned to fire the canisters into the building.
Readily available around the territories, Noxium acted like a gas, but it was really a microscopic life-form that was stored and used like lethal gas. It was really a swarm of particle-sized organisms that attacked living tissue. Upon release from a vacuum canister, the creatures would bore into anything that breathed. They were small enough to slip through combat armor and chew through flesh so quickly that it seemed to dissolve in their wake. Terrorists liked Noxium gas because it was cheap, easily stored, and cruel.
Admiral Brocius never came to Gobi, but he sent an envoy, Captain James Troy. Troy, with a small army, landed three days after the action ended. He sent troops to search Morrowtown, but he personally never left the safety of his ship.
One at a time, Troy called us all into his ship for ten-minute debriefings. He met with Glan Godfrey first, then detained him as he met with the other survivors. Freeman and I were the last men called in.
I walked over to where he was standing, and said, “You’re going to be a hero, Freeman. You saved a platoon.”
He smiled for a moment. It was the first time I had seen any emotion from him. “It won’t come down like that. All Brocius cares about is that Crowley got away.”
Godfrey appeared in the door of the ship wearing his faded uniform. He must have lost a lot of weight in his years on Gobi; you could not even see the shapes of his legs in his pants. “Think they’ll leave him in charge?” I asked Freeman.
“Probably,” Freeman croaked in that low rumbling voice. “After Gobi, life in a military prison would be a promotion.”
“How about me?” I asked.
“You’ll be the hero,” Freeman said, with a bitter edge in his voice. “They don’t want to talk about some mercenary saving the day. Harris, you never belonged on this planet in the first place. There are people watching over you.”
I started to ask what that meant, but Godfrey called us over. He led us into Troy’s flagship.
Freeman had not dressed for the occasion. He wore the same ugly jumpsuit. I suspected he would wear those clothes if he were invited to meet with God. As for me, I wore the Charley Service uniform I had worn when I first landed on Gobi. Except for some nicks from the fireworks, I looked precisely as I had when I landed on that godforsaken planet.
Troy sat behind a large black desk that shone like a mirror. The Cygnus Fleet seal hung on the wall behind him, just above a cluster of flags. He did not stand as we entered, but studied us with indifference. “You are the mercenary?” he asked. “Freeman, is it?”