"Confirm? Confirm?" Furious, Jason would have been on his feet if Tiny hadn't held him down by the back of his belt. "You told me there was no other way to get the information."

"One unreliable source. We needed more than that."

"I went over there and grilled someone who's a complete mental mess, because you wanted a second opinion."

Grant stared at him, the expression in his ice blue eyes never changing. "Do you have a problem with that, Commander?"

He could hardly demand not to be asked to do it again, since he hadn't been asked to do it in the first place. Jason settled for a killer glare and a snarl of "No." Or what passed for a snarl in his voice. He'd long since given up on trying to sound impressive. Dammit, but Mark wouldn't have stood for this. Wouldn't have lost his temper either. And there was Rick, sitting opposite, eagerness personified, watching how he handled this. Man, command sucked.

"So, do we have a mission, or are all these plans theoretical?" Beside him, Princess sat forward. "It seems to me that the Olympus Mons base is the only one that matters. Without it, these little ones won't be viable. And with what we've discussed, we should be able to take it out."

Anderson smiled at her. "We think you are right. We're not worrying about the others at the moment. But the amount of activity in the larger one is concerning, especially since the latest report suggests they are actively building mecha."

"Let's go splat it!" Keyop exclaimed, and Anderson smiled again.

"Indeed. Jason, is your team ready for this mission?"

Jason glanced at Rick, eager, willing and enthusiastic, eyes shining with the expectation of finally getting to go off-planet. And, despite his misgivings, he couldn't say no. There would be no reason for them to do anything other than infiltrate with four people and leave one on the Phoenix. Rick wouldn't go outside the ship, and nobody would think that was in any way strange.

"We're as ready as we're going to get any time soon."

"Then you have a go. Good luck, G-Force!"

Jason caught himself looking round for Mark's cue, and had to swallow before he jumped to his feet, eyes fixed on the opposite wall. Mark had never looked to see if anyone was following his lead, and he wasn't going to either.

"Transmute!"


He was much more comfortable once in the Phoenix itself. Mark had frequently not been there at launch, as it was so much easier for him to dock the G-1 in flight. That was one bullet they'd dodged so far - Rick never had lived off-base, and at the moment he had so much training to do that he didn't have time to even consider it. Thank goodness. The G-1 lived safely in the tail of the Phoenix, and Rick trained almost exclusively on the simulator.

This wasn't a fast response launch. Jason took his time over the checks, and he was fairly sure Princess and Tiny did too. Keyop couldn't wait to spit out "G-3", though, and Rick seemed to take forever to finish. Doing the same checks, Mark had invariably finished first.

Mark was gone, and Jason had growled at the rest of the team enough times that they had to forget him. It was time to follow his own advice.

"Control, we're ready to go."

"Good luck, G-1," Anderson said, and the bay doors cracked open for the water to begin pouring in. With nobody watching him, Jason permitted himself a smile. He was still only acting commander, his promotion not confirmed. And it hadn't escaped his notice as to what the senior staff called him. Since Mark had left, he'd had a whole lot of 'Condor', the occasional 'Commander' when someone wanted to remind him of his new responsibilities. 'G-1' was something nobody had been using. And dammit, it sounded good.

An uneventful launch. Straight into transit - they'd just barely got Rick to the point where they, and he, trusted his quick glance at the instruments and gut feeling that all was as it should be. When they'd first run a launch-and-onward simulation, Rick's face had been priceless. He'd never voiced 'it's reckless not doing the checks properly', but man, had his expression said it. This time there was no hesitation, nothing apart from the fact that he still took longer than anyone else to respond.

"Five minutes to jump," Tiny said shortly, and Jason sat forward and began to fire up all the technology which existed for this one sole purpose. Fragile, hyper-sensitive sensors which would fry instantly if turned on anywhere but deep space. A computer which, Rick was quite right, was outdated. But it worked. He trusted it. It wasn't broken, and he didn't want it fixed, thank you very much. And then there was the giant jump-engine itself, half the back end of the Phoenix. Coming to life, a deep glow in his awareness, halfway between mind and implant. Raw power at his command.

He glanced at the readouts, just to confirm what he already knew, bone-deep. The drive was ready, and the sensors had settled down nicely. Next stop, Mars.

"Data dump, G-2," he said, glancing to his right. Princess nodded and got on with her job, and Jason turned his full attention to the figures on his screen.

This had been his first jump, now almost five years ago. How ironic that it should also be his first jump now he was back in command of G-Force. It wasn't going to be as fast as the original one, that was for sure. Mars wasn't at opposition this time, and the numbers weren't very nice. But it was only Mars. Hardly a long way, for them.

"Ready," Princess told him, and he took a deep breath and relaxed into his connection with the jump-drive. This was what the implant gave him, what he'd missed for all that time: the sensation of raw power just waiting for instruction. All he had to do was look at the equations, see the solutions in the way that nobody else could, set up the drive at the speed of thought, and then pull the control lever all the way back and wait for the drive to redline and take them to the flaming hell that was jumpspace.

Five years of sitting behind Mark, observing someone else in the jump-pilot's role, and Jason knew exactly what a good jump felt like. This one was okay, no more than that. He could do better. For now, he'd sit and endure.

Princess had always said that jump drained her. He found that it burnt, only his eyes and experience telling him that the sensation of searing flesh from bone was an illusion. He wasn't sure what Rick had felt, the one and only time he'd been on a jump-flight, back when he'd been still a trainee. Wasn't even sure he'd been asked, now that he thought about it. Thirty seconds into the jump was a bit late.

Should he have asked? Said something encouraging, to someone making his first jump with the team? Probably not. Mollycoddling couldn't be the answer. Rick had to stand on his own two feet.

Red light faded, bleaching out to the normal diffuse fluorescent of the cockpit, and Jason forced himself to breathe out all the way, and then in, slowly. Beside him, Princess was doing exactly the same thing. Jason noted with amusement that Keyop had not only stayed in his own seat throughout the jump, he'd foregone his usual complaints afterwards. Maybe having Rick on board would be good for something after all.

Up front, Rick's helmet was visible and moving, so their new co-pilot hadn't passed out in jump. That was also good. And Tiny was already getting them under way towards the big red planet filling the viewscreen.

Man, this was horribly familiar. Only this time, they knew that the only people down on the planet were hostile aliens. The only bases were Spectran. That the one human colony had been destroyed without warning, five years earlier.

"No ships," Keyop reported from the radar station.

"Good. Satellites?"

"None that I can see," Rick said.

"Keyop, check that. Princess, any activity on the radio?"

"Bit of chatter, mostly automated, mostly down south. Nothing to indicate they've seen us. Not as much as I'd expected."

"Work with Tiny, find us the least observable path down." Jason pulled up the best approximation they had to the Spectran base schematics and glared at it, thinking hard. This whole raid was based on the belief that there was a connection between the old emergency tunnels of Mars dome and the Spectran base in the foothills of Mount Olympus. Don had been unequivocal that there had to be, that even tasered and mostly stunned he would have been aware of being taken out on the surface. And the ground radar scan done by a lone Galactic Patrol volunteer did seem to confirm it. But whether it was accessible from the surface, after the sheer devastation wreaked on the dome and its surroundings by the first Spectran mecha he'd ever destroyed, was another matter. There had been an emergency shaft on the base's plans, coming up outside the dome itself, and that was his first, and best, hope. It wasn't exactly large diameter, though. It was just as well that Tiny had lost all that weight.

"Course laid in," Tiny told him. "Shall I -"

"Take us down."


Half way down, he'd started to wonder if he should have put some parameters on 'least observable'. He wasn't at all enjoying this roller-coaster descent through the thin, windy Martian atmosphere. Tiny seemed confident, though, and a glance sideways showed him that Princess was still monitoring radio traffic.

"Clear?" he asked through gritted teeth.

"They've no idea we're here."

"Great." He clamped his jaw shut as Tiny pulled the Phoenix into what felt like a seven-twenty turn and Immelmann combined. They were below twenty thousand feet now, deep into the lower atmosphere, only minutes from landing.

"Where do you want her parked?" Tiny asked, half-turning as the Phoenix steadied back onto a more even descent. "Tight to the cliffside?"

Jason telegraphed a glance at the right-hand seat, glad that Rick wasn't looking. "Out a bit. I'm not sure where the access will be." Come on, Tiny. We both know the access is on the clifftop. I want you to leave Rick with an easy takeoff, just in case.

"Understood." Tiny went back to his piloting, and Jason sat back, trying to superimpose in his mind the plans of the dome and the location of the shaft he hoped they could enter by with the old pictures Anderson had produced. Pictures taken of the construction stages, and the completed structure. He was doing his utmost to forget that most of those pictures had people in them. Scientists and technicians, posing for the camera in front of the dome they'd helped build. Some had come home, bringing their pictures with them. The rest had died there. And then there was the third image, the one which existed only in his memory. That same dome, the first time he'd seen it for real, with a shattered hole near the top. The moment all his dreams of a life exploring the stars had died.

"That is one big mountain," Rick commented as they skirted just north of Mount Olympus, close enough now to see individual boulders, and well below the height of the summit. Jason had to agree, it was impressive.

"Obviously," Keyop snorted.

Rick didn't respond, and Jason breathed an inward sigh of relief. It was well past time Rick stopped rising to the kid. At least he was behaving more professionally now they were out on a mission.

There was a sharp intake of breath from Princess as they came over the last rise, and Jason found his attention firmly fixed on his own data screen. Oh, to turn the clock back. To look up and see Don sitting in the co-pilot's chair. An intact dome. No Spectran threat. For this to be a training mission, delivering supplies to humanity's furthest outpost. To know they were going back to Earth afterwards to public acclaim, in their own names. To a career exploring the galaxy, not fighting to save it.

He looked up, and the cliff ahead bore the unmistakeable scar of an explosion. Fragments of the dome's plexiglass reflected the setting sun's rays. The twisted remains of a much smaller ship than the Phoenix littered the flat area below the cliff, and abruptly a large green 'X' appeared superposed on the viewscreen image, below the cliff, a way out from it in the flat area initially cleared by the dome staff for use as a runway.

"That do you?" Tiny asked.

"Fine."

It didn't escape his notice that Tiny circled round before dropping down to land neatly in the centre of the area he'd indicated. Leaving the Phoenix nose to wind, in case Rick should have to move it. Tiny was thinking even more defensively than he was.

The landing was whisper-light, as usual, and as the engine note died away Jason took a deep breath and stood up. His first off-world mission in command. First mission that could be called a mission, really. He didn't count escort duty, or indeed patrol. This one was for real, decisions that mattered his to make. His to succeed or fail.

"Rick, you're staying here. The rest of us - masks and tanks. And make sure they're full - it's a long way to the base and back. Keyop, I want your best guess for the top of that shaft. Princess, I take it we're quiet on the radio front?"

"Reception's poor down here. But there was nothing as we came in."

"Good. Make sure Rick knows what to monitor. Tiny -"

"I know what to do," Rick put in.

Jason turned deliberately back to him. "You're not a radio expert. Listen to her, and pay attention. Martian rock eats our comm signals. Once we go down that hole you're on your own. Tiny, you and I will take a look around."