Exiles of Titan- The Martian Phase

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  EXILES OF TITAN

  EXILES OF TITAN

  The Martian PHASE

  by

  DAVID CHRISTMAS

  YOUCAXTON PUBLICATIONS

  OXFORD & SHREWSBURY

  Copyright © David Christmas 2017

  The Author asserts the moral right to

  be identified as the author of this work.

  ISBN 978-1-911175-72-8

  Printed and bound in Great Britain.

  Published by YouCaxton Publications 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  YouCaxton Publications

  enquiries@youcaxton.co.uk

  For Amanda, Kate and Matthew

  Chapter 1

  Deira flicked the visor of her helmet down and activated her night-vision facility.

  The closing of the warehouse door had left the two agents in darkness so profound it was almost tangible – even their latest tech struggling to render the surrounding barrels and crates into the familiar ghostly green. A sweet, sickly smell permeated the place. It could have been something rotting in one of the containers but Deira had smelled something similar from decomposing corpses.

  She took a moment to configure her head-up display (HUD) as a white schematic on her visor. It showed their current position in the warehouse and a suggested route to the room they wanted at the top of some stairs about fifty metres away. All very straightforward as long as they could avoid the detritus that was scattered over the floor like some form of trap for the unwary. She glanced at Adam and tapped her visor. He replied with a thumbs-up and they began to pick their way slowly towards the distant staircase. They were utterly silent and virtually invisible, their black uniforms and sculpted body armour merging seamlessly into the surrounding darkness.

  They were only part-way to their destination when they heard a sound from above followed by a light coming on in an upstairs room. They froze, hardly daring to breathe, their helmets automatically discontinuing night-vision. Shadows moved behind the glass panel of the door to the room and two voices could be heard, clearly arguing. The voices became louder as the argument spun rapidly out of control and there was movement elsewhere in the warehouse as others began to take an interest in what was going down. The agents looked at each other in dismay. This was exactly what they didn’t need. Should they abort the mission?

  Suddenly, a gunshot rang out, closely followed by the sound of running feet. More lights came on upstairs and a crowd began to gather, converging on the sound of the gunshot. Deira watched with mixed emotions. Whatever they might have been considering was now irrelevant – the decision had been made for them. A mission abort was just not possible.

  The only thing in the agents’ favour now was that nobody was looking at the warehouse floor where they were in plain view. Adam signalled Deira to head towards the nearest cover, a pile of crates a few metres to their right, and they edged slowly forward, trying not to make any sudden movements that might attract the attention of the crowd above. They were making good progress when, suddenly, a man appeared from behind the crates and almost walked into them.

  For the briefest of moments they all stood looking at each other, the man’s mouth dropping open in surprise. Then they all moved at once. The two agents drew their staves and flicked them to combat mode, the baton-sized weapons extending to two metres and extruding wicked-looking half-metre blades at either end. The man simply drew a gun and fired.

  The bullet glanced across Adam’s left arm and bounced off his body armour. The man fumbled with his gun – but before he could get off a second shot Adam’s blade flashed out and neatly sliced his throat open from ear to ear. He collapsed to the floor, blood spurting through his fingers as he clutched helplessly at the wound, and his eyes slowly glazed over. Unfortunately, the damage was done. The agents’ cover was blown. At the sound of the gunshot all eyes swivelled in their direction – to be followed by shouts and pointed fingers. Then the crowd that had gathered outside the room upstairs was charging down the stairs. Most of the men already had weapons but those that didn’t grabbed whatever came to hand. Many of them had guns and weren’t reluctant to use them.

  ‘Force fields!’ Adam pressed a stud on his wrist and looked anxiously at Deira. He needn’t have worried – she’d anticipated this. Her force field was already on, outlining her in a pale blue aura.

  ‘Copy that. Force field on.’

  When the firing started, the bullets rebounded harmlessly off the force fields but the combined impact, with associated transfer of momentum, was still considerable and forced the agents down on one knee into “brace position”. Simultaneously, their helmets went into audio-safe mode, screening out the noise and enabling agent-to-agent communication via tight beam.

  ‘You okay?’ Adam said.

  ‘No problem. We’ve got a load of incoming crap, though.’

  The shooting stopped as the shooters realised they were having no effect and risked hitting their own men. The pack cautiously circled the agents, eying the blades on their staves and yelling taunts and curses. Most carried knives, mainly long and heavily serrated, and a number wielded antique-looking but still sharp swords. One man, a giant who appeared to be a leader of sorts, hefted an enormous cudgel. Deira shot Adam a worried look. This was a real threat. Their force fields could repel anything with high kinetic energy, such as bullets, but were vulnerable to a low kinetic energy knife-thrust. Even their graphene body armour could be penetrated if there was enough strength behind the thrust – a fact unfortunately well-known to the criminal underworld.

  Adam moved away slightly to give them both more space. Back-to-back fighting might be what the tri-vids pedalled in this situation but it would seriously hamper the effective use of a weapon like a staff.

  ‘Do whatever’s necessary,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about the mess.’

  ‘Don’t worry – I won’t.’

  Deira gulped as the crowd round them grew by the second. The agents were faced with a veritable army of misfits, all armed to the teeth and baying for blood. She wouldn’t normally baulk at a fight – in fact she rather enjoyed combat. She’d been a black belt in Karate while she was still at GCHQ and had received advanced training in the use of the Bo, or staff, on
her recruitment to the Bureau. She was confident about dealing with half-a-dozen assailants or even slightly more – no problem – but this was something else again. She roughly estimated the number facing them to be about forty. Say twenty each. That was far too many.

  The men charged. Deira knew that the trick was to keep them at a distance and pick them off as they came within range, a strategy for which the staff was ideally suited. Her opportunity to test this came almost immediately. One man, slightly ahead of the rest and obviously fancying his chances, came at her with an overhead sword swipe aimed at her head. She parried automatically with one end of her staff, whirled on the spot, and neatly sliced open his carotid artery with the blade on the other end. He clutched his neck and dropped to his knees, blood spurting in a high arc onto the concrete, where it lay in a widening pool. For a moment he stared disbelievingly at the sight, then his eyes darkened and, with a gurgling sigh, he fell forward onto his face. One down. Deira moved on in anticipation of the next but it was clear nobody was going to try something like that again. Instead they all attacked at once. Now she really had her work cut out.

  Adam had already dispatched two of his attackers when he came up against the man with the cudgel. The giant stepped close, inside the arc of Adam’s staff, and brought his cudgel down with such force that it would have crushed Adam’s head had it connected. Luckily, it didn’t. Adam leaped backwards just in time and the cudgel smashed into the concrete of the floor, sending shards flying in all directions. The giant roared in anger and hefted his weapon for another try but the slight pause was all Adam needed. He stepped back another pace, altered his grip on his staff, and thrust upwards, using it like a pike. It penetrated the man’s groin and continued up into his abdomen, severing his femoral artery and slicing open his guts. It was a particularly cruel way to die and the man roared and writhed in agony for some time before he finally lay still. His death caused a momentary pause in the action as the rest of the throng gazed at the agents’ knives with more respect. It didn’t last long.

  The ensuing mass attack left both agents fighting for their lives. They used every combat move they knew, and even made up a few, but the number of their assailants was simply overwhelming and they knew they were going to lose. Deira was breathing heavily and trying not to slip in the growing pool of blood and gore that surrounded her. She skewered another assailant who’d chanced his luck by getting too close, and ventured a swift glance in Adam’s direction. A flash of orange caught her attention deep in the shadows some distance behind him – a flash of orange that resolved itself into something completely unexpected.

  ‘Unknown coming in fast at four o’clock,’ she shouted. ‘Force field evident and suggestion of body armour.’

  ‘Copy that,’ Adam acknowledged, though he was facing the wrong way to see the new arrival. ‘Another agent?’

  ‘Could be – but his force field’s orange!’

  Deira tried to keep an eye on the newcomer but couldn’t risk taking her attention away from the fight. Her assailants were pressing in on all sides and had learned from their earlier mistakes, darting in here and there but largely keeping out of range of her blades. Their intention was obvious – to tire her out and wait for her focus to fail. One mistake was all they needed. Then it would all be over. She rapidly forgot about the newcomer and tried to formulate a new strategy. Unfortunately, nothing came to her.

  She continued her thrusts and parries, successfully keeping the mob at bay and occasionally managing to slice one of her opponents who made the mistake of getting too close. However, she was working hard to achieve very little and she knew she couldn’t keep it up forever – the numbers were simply too great. Then – quite suddenly – they weren’t.

  It was then she remembered the newcomer. This had to be something to do with him. She looked round, catching the flash of orange again, and couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The guy was moving so fast he seemed to be everywhere at once, his staff almost invisible such was the rate he was spinning it. He was like a force of nature scything through the army of misfits as if they were stalks of corn. Some tried to escape but were cut down ruthlessly with the rest. Finally, only four remained and the agent, if that was what he was, abruptly stopped and signalled to Deira that she and Adam should deal with these four. Then he gave a smart salute, turned back the way he’d come, and vanished into the darkness behind a stack of crates.

  Deira and Adam finished off the remaining bad guys and stood panting in the sudden silence, sweat rolling down their faces and blood trickling from their blades. They turned off their force fields and returned their staves to standard mode, holstering the now baton-sized weapons.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ Deira said.

  ‘Search me. I’ve never seen anyone move so fast in my life.’

  ‘Nor me. At least he was on our side!’

  ‘So it would appear – but that raises more questions.’ Adam holstered his staff. ‘Okay, we’ll park this for now and move on. We need to get the data wafer.’

  ‘Copy that.’ Deira checked her HUD again. She pointed up the nearby stairs. ‘Up there – room on the left where the light came on.’

  ‘Yeah. Hope the damned thing’s still there.’

  ‘Only one way to find out.’

  They moved slowly up the stairs, alert for any sign of an ambush. Nothing stirred. All was quiet. Perhaps they really had finished off all the opposition. The light was still on in the room and a body lay near the door, a neat bullet-hole in its forehead. A large safe stood in the right-hand corner and, despite the recent action, its door remained securely locked. This was what they were looking for, and the fact it was locked presented no problem to Adam – he set his staff in laser mode and casually removed the entire safe door with a single swipe. He rummaged through a collection of papers and wads of currency until he found what he was looking for – a single data wafer that was carefully stored inside a small box. He interrogated it with his wrist console and nodded.

  ‘It checks out – Q-ship schematics and security protocols. We’re good to go.’

  They carefully retraced their steps back to the warehouse floor and started back towards the distant door, taking a circuitous route to avoid the pile of blood, gore and bodies that was their legacy to this place.

  ‘Better take no chances,’ Adam said. ‘Activate force field again.’

  ‘Copy that. Force field activated.’

  They’d no sooner activated their force fields when Deira noticed a movement in the shadows behind a stack of packing cases they were passing. Then a small object came arcing through the air towards them.

  ‘Grenade!’ she shouted automatically. ‘Incoming eight o’clock!’

  Both agents dropped to brace position as the explosion ripped through the warehouse. Their force fields protected them from flying shrapnel but the shockwave threw them back several metres and left them stunned. By the time they’d recovered sufficiently to stand, a fire had started and rapidly taken hold, blocking their way to the warehouse door. They scanned for alternative routes of escape but hadn’t gone more than a few metres before some drums of industrial solvent exploded. A further wave of intense heat passed over them and they were enveloped by a cloud of acrid fumes from the vaporising solvents. They doubled over in pain and vomited on the floor.

  ‘Oh crap!’

  Deira felt terrible. Every breath sent an agonising pain lancing through her chest and her eyes were so swollen and pouring tears that she could hardly see – not that she’d have been able to see much though the thick smoke anyway. She could feel the heat of the flames over to her right and instinctively angled left, hoping she could get to the exit that way. She wondered where Adam was and tried raising him on the comm, but there was no response. The electronics were probably damaged – either by the explosion or the subsequent wave of heat – so she was on her own. She gulped and started moving towards the left again. Then she felt a hand on hers.

  ‘This way! Take my hand!’ br />
  ‘Adam!’

  She grabbed his hand and felt him pull her firmly towards the right – towards the heat. She baulked slightly, but her faith in him was absolute. She followed his lead, and together they moved steadily through the roiling clouds of noxious fumes. At one point she stopped, uncertain, because it seemed they were heading straight into the roaring conflagration, but the pull on her hand was insistent and she followed once more.

  It was the longest few minutes of Deira’s life. She felt like she’d been struggling through heat, smoke and toxic fumes for ever and was never going to escape this place. Then she felt a sudden cool breeze on her face. What could that be but the doorway? She squinted through the murk and there, a few metres ahead, she could just make out the warehouse door, still jammed open as they’d left it. Such was her eagerness to get outside, she didn’t notice her guide’s hand release her, and she staggered the last few steps on her own. She almost fell through the door opening, slipping in the mud of the alley and almost losing her footing. Then she was taking long rasping breaths of the cool night air and turning her face to the falling rain as if it were a long-lost friend.

  She bent double, coughing and gasping, and it was a few minutes before she was properly able to focus again. Adam was leaning against the wall a few metres away trying to get his breath. If anything, he was suffering more than she was, but when he saw her he stumbled over, still wheezing, and grabbed her arm.

  ‘We need to get away from here,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘The whole warehouse is going up.’

  They staggered along the filthy alley, stopping once to gaze back when the warehouse roof collapsed with a mighty crash. The sound of fire-vehicle sirens split the night and they picked up speed, needing to be away before the fire crews arrived. Finally, they reached their parked Fast Transport Vehicle (FTV) and collapsed inside. Adam confirmed ID by iris scan and fingerprint, gave the autopilot the coordinates of the local Bureau Office, and they fastened their seat belts. The little car shot off into the night.