Free Battleground Mars by Eric Schneider Page B

little. “It would mean a lot to me.”
    The eulogy was like those occasions always are. Miserable and sad. Depressing. It was difficult to see what good it did for Gabi when they gathered in the canteen. The manager, Jacques Fechter, spoke a few words. Then Rahm spoke for a couple of minutes and then Gabi gave the eulogy. She was weeping at the end, and Rahm went across to her and led her away back to the living quarters. He wished her a good night, went back to his own quarters and dug out a fresh bottle of Bourbon that he gave to Kacy and asked her to take to Gabi. He didn’t want her to think he was hitting on her. Not now, not today.
    That night, he had the nightmare again. He was back on Earth, his first major responsibility, chief engineer on the research station in Afghanistan. Vast quantities of opium poppies were harvested and converted for the computing industry on a daily basis. It was winter, and they spent the day outside of the station, on the frozen Afghan plain, supervising the test harvest of a new strain of the poppy. Christine Blake was with him, she too was a scientist, attached to one of his research teams. She was also his fiancée. At the end of the working day they settled inside the relative warmth of their comfortable, prefabricated station. It was a huge building, delivered to the remote area by teams of helicopters. Many advances had come to Afghanistan over the decades, but good roads were not amongst them. The raid took them all by surprise. His bosses had provided them with guards equipped with AK74 Russian-made assault rifles. In this country they were cheap and easily available and the locals were used to their simple, rugged design. They viewed the newer laser weapons, with their complicated electronics and plastics, as little more than toys. Like many Afghans, they had their own way of keeping out the cold, they smoked incessantly. But not tobacco. Opium was their drug of choice, for after all, tobacco couldn’t be picked from the fields during a relaxing walk in the countryside. The terrorists were after loot, food, weapons, anything they could find. They smashed open the main doors and rushed inside the station, shooting wildly. Rahm had previously gone to his office to retrieve his satphone when he heard them. He rushed out in time to see one of his opium befuddled guards go down at his feet in a hail of bullets. The man’s assault rifle dropped next to him, and he stood looking down at it, frozen into inaction. He did nothing, and the bandits swept through the complex, shooting, smashing and ripping out equipment and murdering anyone who stood in their way. The theft became and orgy of violence and destruction, probably drug induced. When they left, he was the sole survivor, unwounded, and left wracked with guilt over his failure to act. He couldn’t explain it afterwards, and he never discovered what had gone wrong. The doctors insisted that he’d had some kind of a seizure at the crucial moment, almost like a stroke. It wasn’t his fault, they said, it could have happened to anyone. The inaction probably saved his life. But it didn’t help Christine Blake. When the bandits left, she was bleeding the last drops of her lifeblood onto the floor. Afterwards he resigned his position and started a new life as a humble driller, working in the worst hellholes on Earth, places that required extraordinary toughness just to survive. He had nothing left to live for, and everything to die for. He’d worked his way up to crew boss, after spells as a mercenary guard in some of the most violent places, and finally cam to join the operation on Mars. It was as far from his ghosts as he could possibly go.
    The mood the next morning was somber, but the business of ripping trevanium out of the Martian surface had to go on. They went out again the next day. They’d made the area around the Nepenthe Valley off limits, as well as those sites that were greater than half way to the Tauron base at