Battleground Mars by Eric Schneider Page A

were on Mars to mine the precious trevanium and go home, nothing more. Professional drillers, most of them were irritated at anything that interfered with the process of ripping the mineral from beneath the surface.
    They drove for two hours until they began to near the Nepenthe Valley. Rahm swung the wheel over and began climbing into the Hadriaca Highlands.
    “You’re going the wrong way,” Saul pointed out.
    “I’m detouring to the higher ground, so that we can check out the valley for any sign of the enemy.”
    “You’re treating this like one of our search and destroy missions in the Amazon basin,” he smiled. “We had some hairy missions, I recall.”
    “They’re missions I’d sooner forget, Saul. I’m not proud of what we did in those days.”
    “They attacked us first, if you remember. I was us or them.”
    “Wouldn’t you have attacked if some huge corporation came in to your home, ripped up the land and poisoned the local rivers?”
    “Well, yeah, but we were good at what we did.”
    “You’re right, but we were damned good, too good, in fact. We became the company’s hired gunslingers, Saul, nothing more.”
    Saul grunted and lapsed into silence. Rahm recalled their bloody, bruising battles with bands of hostile natives. Had be been trying to prove something to himself, after Christine was killed? No doubt a psychologist would say that he was. Thank God it was all in the past, Mars was a sure-fire way of concentrating your attention of other things. And perhaps, must maybe he’d find the answers to the dark nightmares that came to visit him in the night.
      They climbed steeply uphill until Rahm stopped the vehicle on a plateau that overlooked the whole of the Nepenthe Valley. They climbed out and each focused their binoculars on the scene below. Grant Merkel’s buggy came into view, upturned and badly bent, otherwise it looked intact. Pieces of broken machinery littered the ground, and there was nothing undamaged in view. It was a scene of total desolation and destruction. Neither was there any sign of the aliens. The Taurons had departed. Rahm called over to Kaz.
    “Your eyes are the best in the crew, Kaz. Take a good look around, what do you think?”
    The Arab nodded. He seemed to look around for a second for somewhere to spit, for it was something he did before he concentrated on certain tasks. They presumed it was a cultural thing, for luck. But Kaz remembered in time that he had his helmet on, so he looked intently across the valley. After a few minutes he turned to face them.
    “I can’t see anything, but they’re not far away, I can feel them. I’m sure they’re watching the site. It could be that they’re planning another ambush. We should drive straight in and straight out, that’s the only way to handle it, we need to move fast. We should keep the laser cannon manned, the lookouts as well. If Brad takes the gun, I’ll keep watch with Nathan.”
    “We’re going in,” Rahm replied. “I’ll handle the buggy, and Kacy and Saul can recover the data drive with the recording on it. Let’s do it.”
    He drove downhill fast, going fast across the Martian slope and then began the long, slow descent into the valley. There was still no movement, they reached the abandoned drilling site and he stopped the buggy. The crew climbed out fast and went to work. The Tauron regions of Mars were not places to explore at leisure. Brad kept traversing the heavy cannon while Kaz and Nathan mounted the top of the frame and used their binoculars to sweep the surrounding area. Kacy and Saul went to work retrieving the recording while Rahm looked around for any possibility of survivors. It was a forlorn hope, for the alien monsters didn’t leave corpses behind, they had other, grisly, priorities. He looked around to make certain that his crew was keeping a good watch, but he needn’t have worried. They were all professionals, experts in the dirty and dangerous work of mineral exploitation in