nightmare.
Garroway looked at each of the people sitting about the small, plastic table in turn, feeling mingled fear and…pride. This was not exactly the sort of situation the Corps had taught him how to handle, but these were good people. Good Marines. The best….
“So where are we, anyway?” King asked the others at the table. “Not Candor Chasma.”
“No,” Garroway agreed. “Not Candor Chasma. It has to be one of the outposts.”
“Yeah,” Lieutenant King said. “But which one?”
Garroway glanced up, his gaze sweeping across the large and mostly empty compartment—empty, of course, save for the Marines shuffling around and talking as loudly as they could. They couldn’t possibly have found all of the listening devices hidden in the hab.
It had been a foregone conclusion that, since UN troops had stocked the place for them, they’d also left a remote mike or two and were listening in from the warm comfort of their Mars cat outside. Hell, what else could they do out there, except maybe play endless hands of cards?
And if hidden microphones were a possibility, of course, so, too, were hidden cameras. The AVT-400 series used in Marine recon UAVs, for instance, were smaller than the tip of a man’s little finger, were powered by ambient light, and could transmit images on IR or UHF frequencies for a distance of half a kilometer. Without special electronic bug-hunting gear, the Marines might never find them all.
And so, as soon as they’d filed in through the airlock and started pulling off their helmets, Garroway had organized the Marines into bug-hunt teams, sending them throughout the hab in search of anything that might conceivably be a listening device or camera. Within twenty minutes, they’d turned up three cylinders the size of a wrist-top’s power-up key, each less than half a centimeter long, one in each of the two living areas, and a third in the tiny ’fresher and shower cubicle.
As he’d sat at the table and mashed each cylinder in turn beneath his thumb, Ostrowsky had commented wryly that maybe the UN guys had just wanted to do some private peeping at the girls in the shower. Garroway had agreed 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
