Battleground Mars Read Online Free Page B

bloodthirsty, slavering creatures he’d seen on the video clip.
    “I’m not sure they’re entirely corralled, so we need to be pretty careful when we land.”
    To his dismay he realized that even after such a brief meeting he didn’t want anything bad to happen to this pretty and lively girl. Not after the last disaster. Deep inside, he was thinking, ‘stay away from me, Gabi Aaronsen. I can’t protect you. I can’t look after my own people. They wind up dead’. But he couldn’t say what he felt, for he could only look at her pretty face and slim figure, until he forced his head away. She was full of optimism for her new career, and he looked back when he heard her talking.
    “We’ll be ok, I’ll bet the company takes care of all those monster things, we won’t need to worry about them.”
    Was she trying to reassure him, did she think he was scared? Or was he just too sensitive? He heard her talking again.
    “They said all we need to do is drill down and extract the trevanium, and then we’ll come home rich. End of story. That’s what Grant wants, what I want. Isn’t it what you’re going for?”
    How could he tell her he was going to Mars for a different reason? Sure, he wanted the fat pay packet. He had dreams of buying a good piece of land where he could lose himself, and hide himself away from the accusing faces. He would set up his own drilling consultancy business if there was enough money. But it wasn’t the reason he was going. First, he had to forget. To be as far away from the horror and the fear that still haunted his dreams. In the most challenging mining environment known to man, with work that was long and hard, he wouldn’t have time to think about the past. The Earth, with its ugly memories, would recede into the distance, more than a twenty million miles in the distance. Would it be enough to snap the threads that still held his soul to the terrible events of the past? He thought of the Tauron monsters he’d seen on that clip. Yes, maybe it would, there were plenty of problems to concern him, enough danger to occupy his mind. He nodded curtly to Gabi and said, “I’m sure you’re right, most of us are going there for the money.”
    He knew hadn’t been convincing. He felt their eyes on him as he walked out.
     
    He spent the following weeks furiously attacking the ship’s gym. For most of them, the daily sessions were a necessity, a way to stop their muscles from suffering the inevitable atrophy of weightlessness, or low-gravity space travel. For him, it was a catharsis. Day by day, the Earth receded further in the wake of the ship. He worked harder than ever, became an almost continuous occupant of the exercise room. His crew discovered that if they wanted to speak to him, they needed to go there. It became a joke, more than once he'd heard them call it, ‘Rahm’s Office’. He could live with that, as long as he left the Earth and its nightmarish reminders far in behind the hurtling ship. He had a frequent companion in the gym. Brad Haakon was a huge, tough, former marine. Something of a twin for Saul Packer, but the similarity ended there. Where Saul was clever and resourceful, Brad was a blunt instrument. A weapon that Rahm was thankful to have on his crew, given the size of the aliens. Life for Brad held no uncertainties. Women were a legitimate target, men were divided between friends and enemies, and there was nothing in between. If they weren’t friends, you punched or shot them. He’d already familiarized himself with the laser cannon, using the simulator to become expert at shooting targets as they presented themselves on the screen. The laser cannon was the heavy weapon that most Mars buggies carried high on their frames. The company had insisted that the cannon was merely a precaution. ‘You won’t meet any hostiles, because we’ve taken care of that problem. We just like to cover all the bases.’ When Brad wasn’t keeping fit and working his way around the