“Sergeant Ziggenbor!” Flint screamed. “They’re coming!”

Leaping up, Neil met her at their perimeter, ripping the offered binoculars from her hands and looking through them. Seven marauders were coming up through the dimming light, heading straight for their position.

“Vane! Get up here!” Vane appeared at his right a moment later and Neil thrust the binoculars at him. “Can you see what class that is?”

“Those are Saber Class.” Vane said after a moment. “I’m sure.” He supplied without being asked to confirm.

“Shit. Get everyone into what cover you can, emplace the mortars.”

“Specialist Troy is setting the APES now.”

“Go. Flint, get with the medics.” Everyone was moving, and as he pushed himself up he swore at himself for their position. There hadn’t been many options if they had wanted to charge the stripes before sunrise, but the three boulders they had found in the final stretch to Olympus Mons weren't ideal, especially not if Neil’s suspicions were correct.

The marauders zipped overhead without ammunition expenditure, and a for a moment they were lost to view. Neil looked around and saw the medics and Flint with her second. These were surrounded by ten of the infantrymen, the majority of them privates on their first deployment. Most of them had lost the scared, naive look after the first six months, but as the scream of the marauder’s engines came back, so did some of that old fear. “Hold it together!” Neil called to the group of personnel as a whole. “And get ready to move!”

Hard rounds peppered all around them, and Neil ducked to where he hoped was out of the line of fire. Troy had timed it perfectly, and his APES started thrum-chunking away as they passed overhead. The surprise had cost them though. Neil saw three of the soldiers drop, and another stagger to the side with half of his chest missing. He turned, looking for some explanation before he too dropped.

“Go!” Neil screamed, and people started rushing all around as soon as the marauders had cleared. Three of the stripes got piled up, Morgon and his mortars getting on the rear, and they ripped off into the night in different directions. Neil slid down next to Troy. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah, marauder pilots like to stick together, generally speaking.” The heavy gunner said, almost in a conversational tone. “It’s a tick among the pirate groups, and makes sense with the network design of the ships. They’re meant to fly as a unit.”

Even as he spoke, however, two of the marauders broke off and split up, vanishing into the night. Neil looked to Flint, who was crouched behind one of the stones. Her second was… well, the lower half was still in a seated position, and Flint was covered in dark blood.

She looked up at Neil with the familiar questioning; shock and confusion stamped on her features. Then she stood up and started screaming. Diving across the gap between boulders, Neil whirled her around my the shoulders. “Hey! Hey, Flint!”

“Flint stopped screaming and stared at him, the whites of her eyes standing out in sharp contrast to the dying light. “If you scream like that you’ll pass out, and I fucking need you! So grab your shit and stay on my ass!” He spun as the APES found home, and Troy gritted his teeth as his ammo bearer, a young woman, was torn apart by hard rounds from the marauders. Spinning deftly, he tore the starboard wing of another marauder apart with the thwump-chunking of the APES. “Mother--” He began, swiveling the APES on its tripod. “--FUCKERS!” He finished, unloading a charge round in its entirety on another marauder intent on taking out its priority target. Neil saw the craft wobble, as though it was thinking about pulling up. Instead it tried to make an end of the APES gunner that had been their bane.

Troy was better.

The area was illuminated as the marauder exploded into a crimson, yellow, and green fireball, and Neil dove on top of Flint to shield her from falling metal shards propelled their direction from the blast.

Then Troy was with them. Neil was convinced he would never know how he broke down the APES to quickly, but that was why he was the specialist, and Neil was nothing but a Sergeant First Class. “C’mon.” Troy breathed. “Three down, but five is enough for them to take the risk. It’s--”

Neil grabbed Troy and hauled him back at the angry hiss of a felbound missile streaked over their head. It was one of those moments when Neil tracked the situation as it happened, even though he could barely see past the tip of his own nose. The yellow streak that ripped its way across his vision pelted its way groundward, and the sound of keening metal and exploding backup fuel tanks ripped through Neil’s senses. Their last stripe was gone.

“Well.” Troy said. “Fuck.”

Neil felt his chest tighten as the realization set in. If they didn’t have their stripe, and the marauders were coming back around, then they would--

Four marauders screamed by overhead, their secondary engines propelling them away to the southeast, and gone.

“I guess I did take out three.” Troy said.

“What does that matter?” Flint gasped.

“Well, for one thing it’s one less of the motherfuckers taking shots at us. But for another thing, the saber class marauders are designed to be pack vessels anyway. Their networked target systems and operation capabilities will run suboptimal but reliable enough with five, but with four the systems start crashing. They were designed to be cheap as a single unit, but pricey together. That’s why there are so many that get snapped up and modded out.

“Is that why we’re standing here talking and not running for cover?”

“Running for cover wouldn’t do much for us right now.” Neil said. “If they knew it was just us they would come back to finish the job. They must not know where all the other stripes went off to.”

“Hell, sergeant, do you even know that?” Troy asked, without disrespect. “Fact is they’ll double back to whatever hive hangar they’ve got going on and calibrate. They know they hit us with something, they know they hit our people. We’ve seem ‘em three times, and I’m surprised that they’re not pushing they selves on us now.”

“Two times.”

“Sergeant?”

“We’ve seen the Saber Class fighters two times. The time before this they were another class.”

Troy’s eyebrows grew closer together. “Sergeant? Which classification was it?”

“Rapier, Vane said.”

“Awe hell.” Troy squatted, and Neil heard him spit into the dirt. “Rapier class ain’t been used since that terrorist cell was active when I was a kid. Angel, or whatever it was called.”

“Back then it was called.”

“HOVO, yeah I remember now. But that’s not what they called it there at the end.”

Neil shook his head. “Shouldn’t bring it up.”

“But that might change it all, Sergeant.” Troy rose. “Swear to god, it might. Everything I know about tactical emplacement and usage of the APES revolves around them being used in right around three to five fighter teams by pirate cells, but if this is something bigger--” He cut off when he saw Neil’s eyes on Flint. Her eyes were wide and jaw clamped shut as she listened.

“Sergeant Ziggenbor…” Troy put his hand on Neil’s arm. “C’mon, sarge, talk to me. If this is big then it’s a wonder I’ve gotten down as many as I have. Now I’m down an AB, and gonna be flying solo.”

They both whipped around with Flint, the three of them training their weapons on the lights roaring closer at ground level. Easy enough to identify, and at the stripe pulled up broadside of them, Morgon jerked his head to the bed of the truck. “Saw the explosion and doubled back. Rally point six miles east.”

“Sergeant.” Flint said, the headset presses to her ear. “Message from the Tenth Fleet; the Ascendency and detachment will be here in twenty hours.”

“God…” Neil looked around to the looming mountain. “Time to.”

They arrived at the rally point and dismounted, the last stripe moving into the circular formation with the other three. Major Darrow stood there, conversing with some of the other soldiers, but they fell silent as he approached. “They’re gone then?”

Neil nodded. “They’ll be back, though, ma’am.”

“Lieutenant Haven seems fairly confident that for most pirate cells, Specialist Troy’s admirable marksmanship should be knocking them out of the fight.”

Absolute silence reigned as Neil stared at the Major. And he felt his temper rising. She leveled her own gaze back to him, and dared him to speak.

He obliged. “I am sure.” Neil said. “That if this is a group of fucking pirates then they might not be back to fuck with us. I am equally sure that if it isn’t, they’ll be back by the time we make the extraction point. The one thing I do know for a goddamn fact, ma’am, is that the Tenth Fleet is inbound to the extraction point, and if we are not there we run the risk of being left behind. Written off as an acceptable loss. Now I’m done talking, ma’am. Submit the paperwork when we get back for my rank, or whatever else the fuck you want to do, but I am done talking. We need to mount up, we need to drive until sunrise, run the calculations, and push to the extraction point within twenty hours. Or we are dead.” He turned and walked back to Morgon. “Can we make it to morning on our reserves.”

The mortarman nodded. “Further if we have to.”

“No, so long as we’re not under fire at dawn, we stop to charge up. 3-95th! Mount up!”

--

Matthias rose as the session adjourned, leaving the senate chambers with a heavy heart and a hurting brain. He had briefed them on the situation in the Martian sector and the action had, of course, been condemned, and outrage expressed. But when it came to action, little more was proposed than to strengthen periodic patrols of the old systems and an accelerated schedule for the scrubbing of Mars’s atmosphere. The only thing that had surprised Matthias was that no one had, as of yet, tried to slip in an additional timeline as to when Mars could be terraformed and the whole process started over. With that proposition would come the endless squabbles about why scrub the damn rock at all, and should it be preserved… so on, and so forth.

The notion set Matthias’s teeth to itching. As he left, he came up on the only person he was interested in seeing for the rest of the day. “Senator Ziggenbor.” The woman said with a warm smile and a twinkle in her eye. She was seated in a wheelchair, old, plump, and dressed in a smart blue suit with what appeared to be a badly made home knitted blanket across her lap. “That was a very concise briefing you delivered there. Almost as though you have the military in your blood.”

“How about that.” Matthias said with a smile. “It’s good to see you, Senator Rezkin.”

The old woman’s face became slightly sadder. “This would usually be my entry to ask how your brothers are doing, but I suppose you answered that for us all.”

“I did my best to leave little room for deliberation.” He said. “But I was hoping I could come around for tea sometime.”

Her eyes came up, narrowed behind her glasses, and then the warm face was set firmly back in place. “Of course, young man. I have missed our visits. I’ll have my aid talk with yours, and we’ll get the whole thing set.”

“Thank you, senator.”