Red company invasion, p.1
Red Company: Invasion, page 1
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RED COMPANY:
INVASION
by
B. V. Larson
(Book #4 of the Red Company Series)
The RED COMPANY Series:
First Strike!
Discovery
Contact
Invasion
Copyright © 2024 by Iron Tower Press, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.
Chapter 1: The Crater
I was taking a piss when the call came to deploy on the double. Twelve minutes later, I was thumping out of my crappy Mars City apartment, cursing with every step.
My comms crackled in my ear, and I couldn’t get my helmet to seal right, but I trotted through the streets anyway. Passersby looked at me as if I was demented. That was a good thing, because I was in the mood to knock them out of the way with my one swollen arm if they didn’t move aside.
It wasn’t even dawn yet. From inside Mars City’s dome, the night sky was a black sheet with bright stars. The view was much clearer than Earth’s sky, and I glanced up to see if there were any big warships parked in orbit overhead.
I didn’t see any cruisers, and that was a good thing. Instead, I spotted the two moons of Mars. They were gliding along like they always did. The disk of Phobos was the bigger and closer of the two. It moved quickly, casting shifting shadows on the red desert. Deimos, smaller and farther away, moved slower. It resembled a very bright star.
When I reached the massive deployment airlock, the one that was big enough for large vehicles to pass through, the clamor of the city was replaced by the crunching sound of Red Company’s boots on the Martian soil.
As dawn broke, the sky took on a coppery color from the planet’s sandy surface. The stars were still bright, however. Glancing upward now and then as I reached my assigned rally point, I was really checking to see if any invaders had appeared. I still didn’t know the source of this emergency.
But there was nothing obviously wrong in the sky. Now and then, a white spark marked the path of a meteor as it shot by. These brief flashes were nothing unusual.
In the airlock, the air was thin and tasted like iron. Red dust gritted in my teeth, making me curse under my breath. I slammed my helmet shut and turned on the oxygen.
My squad straggled in—mostly after I did, to my good fortune. I cuffed them and bitched at them as they arrived.
We all piled into two carryalls, massive friggers with balloon tires meant to handle Mars’ unforgiving terrain.
Ledbetter was beside me. His enhanced ears were twitching at every sound. His wide eyes tried to take in everything.
He turned to me, his mouth forming a thin line. “They’re really riding our asses to get outside on the double. What’s the rush, Starn?”
I shrugged, staring out the cloudy shaded windows at the vast Martian landscape. “Don’t know, Corporal. Orders came from the top, no explanations offered.”
Ledbetter scoffed, shaking his head. “That’s always the way, isn’t it? We’re just rats in a new trap. Same shit, different day.”
Deciding to reach out for information myself, I stood up and moved through the bench seats in the carryall. My helmet scuffed the rough metal roof of the vehicle, banging against it when we went over a bump.
“Cox?” I called to the senior Sergeant Cox, who was perched on the frontmost row of seats.
His gnarled hand was clamped onto one of the dusty handles, and he rode the bounces like a champ. His face was weathered from years of service. The stark white patches in his hair contrasted against his dark skin.
He looked at me, a toothpick hanging loosely from the corner of his mouth. “What do you want, Starn?”
“Your thoughts on this joyride?”
He chewed on the toothpick thoughtfully, then shrugged. “Orders are orders, Starn. We go where we’re needed.”
“And if we’re heading into some corporate bullshit?”
He grinned, showing off his teeth, which were stained yellow from years of nicotine use. “Then we shoot our way out.”
The troops around us chuckled at that. Cox didn’t even look at me after that. I figured he was still butt-hurt about certain events that had happened in the past. Some people held grudges.
We rumbled on toward Olympus Mons. Through the dusty windshield of the carryall, the dead volcano was an immense, sprawling mountain. Its vast base stretched across the Martian landscape, dwarfing everything in the vicinity. The top was shrouded in thin, wispy clouds, and the summit was barely visible in the hazy distance.
“Another damn training exercise?” Ledbetter grumbled. “That’s got to be it.”
“Did you hear something, bat-ears?” I asked him.
He shook his head. His hearing was sharper than anyone else’s, but he couldn’t guess at our destination any better than I could.
“You should go ask him,” Ledbetter said, pointing toward the back of the bus.
I craned my neck and did a double-take. Accountant Blackwood was sitting in the rear of the vehicle. He looked totally out of place. As far as I knew, he’d never been on a troop deployment before.
“Holy crap…” I said, and I took Ledbetter’s advice. Moving hand over hand to the back of the vehicle, I approached Blackwood.
He looked unhappy to see me coming. “Sergeant Starn?” he said. “Having trouble finding a seat?”
“No sir… I was just wondering… I mean, some of the boys would like to know where we’re headed and why.”
Blackwood shrugged his skinny shoulders. “If you haven’t been briefed, then you’re not supposed to know.”
That was all I could get out of him. I returned to my seat and watched Olympus Mons grow ever larger as we approached.
But our convoy didn’t halt at the usual training grounds. Instead, we veered south toward a dusty airstrip. There, a behemoth of an air vehicle appeared in front of us.
The sight of it made my stomach clench-up a bit. Where the fuck were we going?
“Looks like a change of plans…” I said, doing my best to sound cool.
The troops were all grumbling and speculating now, and I couldn’t blame them.
“That thing is cranking up its props.” Ledbetter declared. “They’ve been fooling us from the start!”
“You serious? You can hear that?”
He looked at me and nodded, eyes wide. “I can hear it. They’re revving.”
The air transport was a VTOL—a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle. It had four big props in shrouds and some jet turbines to add lift. The Martian atmosphere was thin, but the gravity was light. Those changes in physics meant that drones and helios could still fly on this planet.
Our carryall bounced over some hills and up a ramp that stuck out of the transport like a black steel tongue. We climbed out and helped the crew secure the vehicle to the platform of the transport, fastening it down with chains and straps.
The clang of the metal and the harsh grating of the chains filled the air. I could hardly believe it. We were going on a flight—but to where?
I tried to catch Lt. Quinn’s eye, but he avoided my gaze. He ignored all my private calls over the comms, too.
That meant he knew where we were going, and he didn’t want to tell us. Weird. I was just a sergeant, so I played it off to my men like this was all normal—but it wasn’t. Usually, we were briefed into total stupefying boredom when we went on deployment. Ops done in vacuum were inherently dangerous. You wanted everyone in on every detail, so no one screwed up and got themselves killed—those were the normal rules. Apparently, they didn’t apply today.
Then we were in the air, and Mars stretched out below us. The red soil, the mountains, the valleys—all of it raced past us. We clung to handholds inside the carryalls, rocking and lurching along.
“Sergeant?” Ledbetter yelled over the roar of the engines. “Where the hell are we going? You’ve got to know by now.”
“No idea, Led,” I shouted back, my gaze turning to Blackwood again.
He was holding onto a strap, his knuckles white from the strain. His usually impeccable spacesuit was ruffled by the strain, and he looked as out of place as a cat in water.
I decided to give him another shot. “You wouldn’t happen to know our destination now, would you, Blackwood?”
His eyes flickered towards me, cold and calculating. “You’ll find out soon enough, Sergeant.”
I let out an unhappy gr
I leaned back against the carryall and tried to enjoy the flight. The endless Martian landscape zoomed under me. We were flying east, along the Martian equator. The flight seemed to take forever. Eventually, we were fed and given a break to land and empty our suits. Then, we took off again and flew farther.
We flew all day until night began to fall again. Above, the darkness of space stretched out, splashed with the alien light of distant stars. Below, the Martian desert stretched out for miles. The dark red sands reminded me of waves in a dead sea. Ancient craters punctuated the landscape. Without much atmosphere to protect her, the planet’s history had been long and violent.
Suddenly, a flicker of movement below caught my eye. The silhouettes of towering Martian monoliths rose in the distance, their sharp edges softened by the shroud of the Martian night.
“Look at that shit…” I muttered, mostly to myself.
“Holy hell,” Ledbetter’s wide eyes reflected the ghostly glow of the Martian monoliths.
“You two enjoying the scenery?” Blackwood had emerged from the back of the carryall.
He was so tall, so wiry thin, he couldn’t stand upright in the cabin. His tone was cold and harsh. His words cut through the eerie quiet of the Martian night. He looked almost spectral, lit by the glow of the instrument panel.
“Just admiring your home turf, Blackwood,” Ledbetter said rudely.
I gave him a glare, and he changed his tone slightly.
“Um… sir…” he said.
Blackwood was officially an officer aboard Borag. Only, we weren’t aboard Borag now, and we arguably weren’t involved in ship’s business. Whenever our ship languished for a long time in port, morale and discipline tended to break down. It was an issue aboard all spaceships. Our voyages were long, and so were our shore leaves.
Blackwood didn’t make an issue of Ledbetter’s disrespectful attitude. Instead, he turned his gaze toward the Martian landscape outside.
He took a seat up front, and everyone scooted away from him. No Red Company man wanted to associate with Blackwood, who had a grim reputation. Sure, he was part of the crew, but he was among the worst of such men.
As Ledbetter had often put it, he was the leper with the most fingers. We had to tolerate him, but no one was happy about it.
The air transport dropped us off on a plateau, and the carryall rolled down the dark tongue of a ramp onto the red sands again.
Blackwood stayed behind on the flying platform. His tall, thin frame lit up by the harsh glare of landing lights against the Martian night.
As we rolled away, his features became unreadable in the distance. They were hidden beneath a cloud of dust. But had he given us a final sneer of contempt? He certainly hadn’t waved, saluted, or wished us luck.
The quiet hum of the carryalls’ twin engines revved and transformed into a dull roar. We rolled over the desert toward the strangest structures on Mars.
Some said these towering rocks were natural. Others maintained they were ancient structures like we’d found elsewhere—in other words, left behind by aliens. None of us knew the truth.
From the strange light I’d seen in Blackwood’s eyes, I had to wonder if he’d known more than we did. Time would tell.
We were all subdued. The presence of the towering dark rocks was oppressive. The only sounds were the hum of the engines and the whipping wind. We were small specks crawling like fleas over this vast, alien landscape.
The journey continued, the terrain beneath us continued to change, a mass of darkness slowly revealed itself. The Gale Crater, vast and ancient, was an enormous scar on the face of Mars.
In the middle of the crater, standing tall, was Mt. Sharp. Her peak rose above the floor of the crater, the dawn light casting long shadows over the red sands.
Lt. Quinn shuffled out of the officers’ cubby and scowled. “Starn,” he yelled over the sounds of the engines and the wind, “get your men ready. As soon as we halt, I want you deployed as if we’re stepping into a war zone.”
“What’s going on, Lieutenant?” I yelled back.
“Not sure…” Quinn admitted, his eyes steely and focused. He pointed to the flickering lights ahead. “But you see that? Some kind of operation is ongoing here. It’s our job to find out what’s what.”
A jumble of colored lights flickered on the ground ahead, like sparks dancing in the dark. Was it a base? Or perhaps something else?
“All right, ladies!” I shouted, rallying my squad. “You heard the lieutenant. We’re going in hot. Gear-up!”
My men rechecked their weapons, adjusted their armor and re-strapped their gear into place. A dozen oxygen levels were checked and rechecked. There were lots of things that could kill a man on Mars, and most of them were simple in nature.
I could see the worry in their eyes. Those flickering lights ahead—they’d filled my troops with uncertainty. But this was Red Company. Uncertainty was part of the job.
The ancient rock walls of Gale Crater enclosed us, casting us into darkness again. The sun hadn’t yet risen enough to light the depths of this hole in the ground.
Mt. Sharp stood out, a stoic guardian amidst the chaos. Like many of the biggest craters in the solar system, this one being more than ninety miles across, the center of the impact point had dimpled up, forming Mt. Sharp. The mountain was over three miles high—and we were heading straight toward it.
The carryalls bounced across the rugged landscape, engines howling as they raced towards the flashing lights. The base emerged from the dusk, abandoned and desolate. It was like a ghost town, filled with lit inflatable habitats that lay empty and lifeless. Some were damaged, slashed open by unknown causes.
“You hear anything, Corporal?” I asked.
“Nothing but the wind and the flapping tents...” Ledbetter’s voice crackled in my ear, his tone uneasy. I felt it too, the unsettling silence of the place.
“We’re not alone, men,” Lt. Quinn’s voice cut through the chatter on the comms. “There’s a distress signal repeating. That’s what we’re here for. Stay sharp.”
A distress call… from out here? Why had Mars Colony asked us to deploy instead of using their own rescue squads?
The answer seemed obvious. Whatever had gone wrong—it was dangerous. They’d called up Captain Hansen and paid her to deploy her marines.
Why had they done that? Well… it had to be for the same reason officials had hired armed men since time began… so you wouldn’t lose your own forces. Mercenaries—which we played the part of upon occasion—always served in the worst circumstances.
We were tough professionals, sure. But that didn’t mean we were utterly fearless. The empty base suddenly looked a whole lot more menacing. Red Company was here to investigate, but what were we walking into? A trap? An alien encounter? Or just the remnants of a mundane disaster?
The carryall lurched to a halt, and I was screaming: “Go! Go! Go!” until the last of my troops threw himself out the big doors and leapt clear of the fat tires.
My marines fanned out with rifles in their armored fists, each team took a section of the perimeter to guard. Red Company, with all its flaws and ragged edges, moved with a single-minded precision that was eerie in the quiet of what looked like an abandoned base.
There were plastic domes, torn-up flapping tents, spilled equipment—everything but bodies. Something bad had happened here, and it didn’t look like it was just all due to a freak sandstorm.
The sparkling lights were revealed now. They were buzzing drones. Like fireflies, they drifted around the base in circles.
“Like flies on shit back home, huh, Sergeant?” Ledbetter asked me.
I waved for him to keep his eyes forward. He grinned and trotted to check the tents. There was no one living—or dead.
Through my visor, the lab seemed out of place. We were up against the monumental East Cliff area, just a huddle of human debris at the foot of the sheer, red wall of ancient rock.
As we approached the cliff, things became more clear. There were digging machines parked at the base of the rocky walls.
“This has to be an archaeological dig,” Lt. Quinn’s voice crackled over our tactical comms. “Anyone seen a living soul yet?”
“Negative, sir,” I responded. “No bodies, either…”
“Keep looking. Maybe bandits hit them and kidnapped them or something.”
