Chapter 7: Back to business
"Sir, I'm just an ordinary pilot, I've never fought in a land battle!" Ethan didn't even have to guess, it was clear what Salen Kotch was up to.
"But General LeFrancis didn't say that, that's an order!" Salen Kotch had a serious look on his face and a tone that brooked no refusal.
"All right, sir!" Ethan could only say that he would obey the arrangement, "but I want to get all the equipment I might be going to need!"
"You will get all the weaponry we currently have, and after you disable the air defence system, the Olympus Mountain will come in immediately, and the future of Mars is in your hands!"
"Rest assured sir, Mars Aeternum!" Ethan strained his facial muscles with all his might to keep from laughing, how blind were these Martians that the future of Mars was entrusted to his hands.
But Salen Kotch was so moved by Ethan's expression of righteousness that he would have given him a hug if he hadn't been trying to maintain his high profile.
But that brief glance was enough; Ethan's golden psychic energy had already planted seeds in Salen Kotch's own head, just waiting for a time to blossom.
...... ...... ...
In fact, after the raid was prevented, the UNSA military tightened its grip on the interrogation of the arrested Martian spies. Faced with the miserable situation in Geneva, these interrogators, who had a lot of fire in their bellies, naturally could not give any preferential treatment to each other.
But it was the head of the Martian spy, Achillemin Rhea, captured by Reyes, who was as stinky and hard as a toilet stone, who hadn't eaten, drunk or slept for three days and still had the energy to refute the interrogators.
In addition, the UNSA's sweep of the ruins of Geneva continued, and there were still a few remaining Martian soldiers and droid units in the vast city, so the UNSA's search and rescue forces were fighting while they searched for surviving civilians.
"Sir, Geneva is not quite safe yet, why don't you retreat?" An officer stood nervously on the top floor of the UNSA building and, after much hesitation, spoke to Admiral Raines, who was silent to one side.
"No, I'll stand here!"
"But you have the entire UNSA fleet to command!"
"There is only one carrier left in the fleet, I trust Reyes, rather the prisoner, Geneva is not very safe, you will send him to Berlin as soon as possible, the federal prison there is well fortified and safer!"
"But ..." the officer tried to say something else but was despised by a dark-faced Reyes.
"All right, I'll make arrangements instantly!"
...... ...... ...
"They're making a move!" Just inside the ruins of a building less than three thousand metres from the UNSA headquarters building, Ethan was lying motionless in a dark tactical cloak, amidst the masonry and rubble, with a dozen similarly dressed Mars Commando soldiers beside him.
"Look out, they're coming out!"
In the binoculars, Rhea, dressed as a yellow engineer, was being carried out of the UNSA headquarters building by two heavily armed commandos and shoved into a six-wheeled armoured vehicle.
"Going to do it?" A soldier next to Ethan asked in a whisper.
"No, this is a heavily defended area for them, let's take a detour and go ahead and cut them off!"
For this rescue plus attack, Mars had put its money where its mouth was, putting in two experimental Raven transports with leap engines mounted directly, Ethan reached Geneva as they bypassed the lunar defences and disguised the Raven transports as debris falling towards the ground.
"Sir, they're on the bridge!" The Martian soldier who had taken over the surveillance from Ethan and the others sent a report.
"Follow them and drive them towards the expected ambush point!" Ethan took the PDA and drew on it a few times, marking out the pursuit route.
In the rain that almost obscured the starlight, two armoured vehicles roared over the ruined wreckage and charged onto the still intact viaduct.
"Enemy attack!" The UNSA vehicle escorting Rhea accelerated as it frantically called for help from any friendly forces that might be around. The armoured vehicles belonging to the Mars Commandos also accelerated as they strafed the escort vehicles ahead.
The dazzling fire and deafening gunfire shot up into the sky, and the two concrete pillars supporting the bridge exploded as the escort vehicle was about to drive off the viaduct.
The escort vehicle creaked and crashed heavily to the ground amidst the clickety-clack, sending the occupants inside sprawling to the ground.
"Speed up, they're reacting!" Ethan jumped up in stride to the heights of the ruins and looked out into the distance, wherein in the darkness of the night a little light was rapidly approaching.
The Mars Commando soldier quickly used a heavy breaching tool to take the armoured vehicle apart and then pulled a bloodied Rhea from inside.
"Sir, are you all right!"
"Leave me alone, I have a mission to do, you guys hold off the pursuers!" After taking a breather, Rhea took the pistol from one of the commando soldiers and started to move, while the UNSA HoWolf fighters in charge of the alert had already arrived over the ambush site.
"Fire freely!" Ethan ordered loudly as all the soldiers began firing as he went after Rhea, followed by only a few battle droids at his side.
Ethan knew exactly what Rhea was going to do, which was to detonate the time bombs that had been laid on the anti-aircraft system, destroy the AA electromagnetic railgun, and then activate the transmitter that was built into his body to draw the wandering Mount Olympus to him, but Ethan wasn't going to let him do that, as the Star Torch was almost fully charged anyway, so he would add more fire to it and then leave.
Only because he was unfamiliar with the terrain, Ethan soon lost sight of Rhea, even the battle droids he had sent to search for the UNSA soldiers to fight because they might give away his position.
"Where is this guy?" Just as Ethan was at a loss, a sparking Huwolf fighter sputtered and crashed to the ground, with excellent eyesight Ethan saw a spray of graffiti and subs sprayed on the underside of the Huwolf fighter's cockpit, Ethan recognised that it appeared to be the new captain of the UNSA Retribution carrier, the seat of Reyes himself, he must have come for Rhea as well, Ethan followed without hesitation.
"Martian commandos!" Ethan had just climbed up to a church building that had half its roof cut off when a barrage of bullets crackled into his chest and the impact knocked him to the ground.
"Shit!" Ethan rolled on the ground, dodging the bullets and cowering behind the wall, then he grabbed the detection grenade at his belt and threw it.
The beeping red glowing detection grenade released waves of light invisible to the naked eye, showing the UNSA soldier firing on his helmet's display.
Ethan turned and climbed to his feet, taking the EBR800 energy sniper rifle off his back and locking on to his target through the scope.
The blue beam of energy melted through stone and steel, through brick and asbestos tiles, and then hit fragile flesh.
The energy weapons used by both sides in the Infinite Warfare were not strictly lasers, but plasma powered by electricity and was so destructive when they hit the human body that even if Ethan had only deliberately attacked the non-vital parts of these soldiers, they would still inevitably have to use prosthetic limbs later in life.
"Sorry about that!" Ethan dropped the bleeding kit he was carrying and kicked away their weapons before following the trail.
The crash site of Reyes' seat wasn't too far away; the Huwolf fighter's vectoring engine had been destroyed, but the open cockpit and the fallen Martian battle droids nearby suggested he was still fighting well himself.
...... ...... ...
Reyes hid behind cover and looked at the machine guns spitting fire overhead as he chased Rhea all the way to a half-collapsed skyscraper where he was attacked by a large number of battle droids, and if it hadn't been for a wave of fire support from friendly Raven transports, then he might have had to cower behind cover and wait for reinforcements instead of the next step at the top of the platform that he had now reached by single-handedly killing his way through the blockage. The next step.
By now Reyes was so desperate that he hadn't realised until now that Rhea's goal was not to escape but to destroy the steel shield that held the skies of Earth.
The Martian army would kill every single Earthling, they didn't need slaves or population, for them, Earthlings were already equated with cattle.
While the machine gun was changing its energy magazines, Reyes opened the folding shield on his arm and roared at the last Martian soldier guarding the entrance to the platform.
The two men fell to the ground together on impact, and the Martian soldier tried to finish Reyes off by drawing his pistol, but the latter held it down.
The commotion of the struggle drew the attention of Rhea, who was tweaking the detonator, who took one look at the two men on the ground and turned his head back to the computer in front of him, there were still a few dozen seconds before the overload of the aa cannon circuit, once the overload was complete, his mission would be done.
Reyes also noticed Rhea, he pressed as hard as he could over the Mars soldier's gun and fired several shots in Rhea's direction, forcing Rhea to move away from the console to dodge the bullets, and the Mars soldier took the opportunity to trigger back and give Reyes a hard shot to the shoulder.
"See, that's what you Earthlings do, you hesitate to do things and you end up with nothing!" Rhea sneered as he got up and looked at Reyes who had his head ripped off, taking a bullet in the shoulder and failing to finish off the Martian soldier, instead he missed and was captured.
"You're bound to fail in the end!" Reyes forced himself to look at Rhea, who was crouched in front of him, still playing with a dagger.
"Too bad you won't see that day!" Rhea didn't pay any attention to Reyes' nonsense, he didn't hesitate to slam down the keyboard after the terminal showed that the progress was complete, then Reyes was horrified to see all the electromagnetic cannons deployed around Geneva explode and smoke roll out.
"No, no! What have you done?"
"It's your destiny!" Rhea, whose face was full of frenzy at the moment, looked at the sabre in his hand and for a second contemplated that he was about to raise it and stab himself in the abdomen, but the moment he had just raised the blade, two shots broke the silence of the scene.
Rhea, who still had a hint of frenzy on her face, fell stiffly in front of Reyes, along with the Martian soldier, both of them shot in the head.
Reyes looked over to where the shot had been fired, and there stood a Martian officer in a black and red combat uniform with a gold pilot's medal on his chest.
"You are?" Seeing the other man put his weapon away, Reyes also stood up with his shoulder covered.
"Long story short, he's got a transmitter in his body, just dig it out and the Mount Olympus will enter the atmosphere and take a shot at that building, so get a grip on what you're going to do, also don't think that if you don't dig the transmitter out you'll be fine, the transmitter will also send a signal when Rhea's vitals are gone, so we've got thirty seconds! " Ethan said quickly as he pulled out his medical kit and pressed it to Reyes' shoulder.
"I got it!" Reyes didn't question whether what the other man was saying was true or not, as Admiral Raines had been right on the channel and he heard what Ethan said, then the Admiral's guard yanked the Admiral straight out of the building and flew out.
"Punisher, prepare to leap, Sasa, inform the marines and prepare to board!" In just over ten seconds Reyes had thought of a countermeasure and reported his plan back to Fleet Command.
"Let it go, I've sent men over to support you!" Admiral Raines gave the other man all access without waiting for Reyes to finish his report before he then turned the call to Ethan.
"So this gentleman, who the hell are you and why are you helping us? I don't remember you being on our intelligence staff!"
"I'm just a passing visitor, I just think it's a shame that after spending thousands of years out of the Earth, the first thing humans do is not explore the vastness of the universe but instead hide in the solar system and kill each other, don't you find that ironic?" Ethan looked into the distant sky with his intercom as a new sun was rising, and the very next second a huge U-shaped starship appeared abruptly above the Geneva sky, followed by a tyrannical and unmistakable speech coming over the radio.
"This is Admiral Salen Kotch of the SDF, I declare that Earth will be completely subjugated to Mars on this day, and I now order you to kneel on the ground and await your execution!"
Before the words of the radio had ended, the shaft cannon in the u-shaped recess of Mount Olympus had been aimed at the UNSA's headquarters building.
After a blinding flash of light, all that was left of the building and the surrounding buildings within a kilometre ended up as a huge round crater still smoking.
"Gator, this is the time!"
"Gator, now!"
The Olympus Hill, which had just finished firing, was just about to shift its massive hull when another large arc of electricity spread out from the sky appeared, followed by the Retribution, which was only two-thirds the size of the Olympus Hill, almost plastered to the right of the Olympus Hill.
"Sir, we're losing power and can't fire!" Looking at the nearing Retribution, Salen Kotch was so anxious he was slamming the table, but the energy field created by the battleship's leap out of FTL had directly disabled all of the Olympus Hill's systems, and for at least five minutes the Olympus Hill could only be a floating island high in the sky.
"Little Sa!" A distraught Reyes on the ground hurriedly jumped up without waiting for the rear hatch of the transport to fully open before he remembered that Reines had just told him to watch Ethan.
"It's okay, I'm not running, you go ahead and do your thing!" Ethan found a fairly clean rock and sat down, then fished a box of compressed biscuits out of the pouch on his belt, "That, got any water?"
Not knowing what to say, Reyes took Marine Sergeant Kashima's canteen and tossed it to Ethan, then waved his hand and told the pilot to take off, they had to complete the boarding while Mount Olympus was immobile for the next five minutes.
And Ethan did just as he said he would, sitting leisurely in place and just eating and drinking.
While the sky was pinging and banging, two Raven transports came whirring in, followed by the UNSA supreme commander, Admiral Raines, coming down with a large bag of military rations.
"Your Martian compressed biscuits are like shit, try Earth's! Mr Hunt!" Raines waved his hand for the raven to leave and walked over to Ethan himself, took a piece of the dry ration Ethan was holding and shoved it into his mouth, chewed it twice and then spat it out.
"Then I'll not hold back!" Ethan didn't push back, ripping open the packaging of the military rations and proceeded to pick up the various flavours of energy bars inside and crunch them down.
"So, what exactly are you?" Admiral Raines examined Ethan carefully for a few moments, noticing that the current Ethan was a different person from the one who had left an image of him during his previous studies on Earth, and if various detection methods hadn't determined that there was no difference between the two Ethan's, he would have wondered if someone had taken his place.
"Me? Just a human, Admiral Raines, how about we make a deal?"
"What kind of deal?"
"I have the Martian Home Fleet's deployment map patrol routes including the war reserve depot, and I want all the technology for the artificial gravity system and the leap engines!"
"What's in it for you?" Raines' first thought was that this guy was crazy, but after the thought that he could completely flip the whole war, he patiently continued the conversation.
"You don't have to care about that, just say yes or no. Of course, you can lock me up or shoot me, but that would just keep the tug-of-war between Mars and Earth going for years, if not decades more!" Ethan gave a confident smile.
In the original plot, Reyes had followed Salen Kotch's tactics after capturing the Olympus Mountain and jumped straight into the face of the Martian home fleet, destroying the Martian orbital dock only after paying the huge price of the Olympus Mountain crashing, the Retribution crashing, and only four survivors from the entire ship, and losing all the warships both sides had saved over the decades.
"Men, take him away!" Raines pondered for a few seconds before suddenly bellowing, while the UNSA soldiers on guard not far away cooperated by putting on a fierce and fierce face.
But to Raines' dismay, even though the gun was about to poke him in the nose, Ethan still looked as if he was on cloud nine.
"All right, you guys go on down!" Raines sighed helplessly, he was so desperate for a victory that the ups and downs of the past few days were a little too much for him, a veteran of the war, especially with the shelling of the Olympus Hill just now, and if it hadn't been for Ethan's warning then thousands of lives in the UNSA headquarters would have been turned into dead again.
"You can't have everything you want, at least not the leap engines!" Raines' head shook like a rattle.
"Then get something else... a robot... I thought you had some kind of tactical reinforcement robot... that would work!" When it came to intelligent robots, Ethan had a real craving for them, not to mention Ethan, just the constant stream of robotic troops on Mars had Ethan drooling, after all, robots were really a very good substitute compared to human life.
"That one won't work either, we've spent billions on this project ..."
"So do you still want to take on Mars?"
Raines' brain glazed over, and that was when Reyes sent him a communication.
"General, we have entered the Olympus Mountain and are engaging the enemy!"
"Good, I will continue to send in additional reinforcements, Reyes, make sure you take the battleship down for me!" Reyes hung up the communication and after a few seconds of hesitation, chose to accede to Ethan's request.
"Okay, get me a room and I'll give you the intel as soon as I get the datasheet!"
"Yes!" I don't believe you can run away!
Raines' thoughts were not hidden from Ethan, but the latter didn't mind, he would leave once he had the information, so it would be useless even if Raines put him in jail.
He didn't choose to give Ethan the electronic data, instead, he had his men pullover truckloads of drawings and data, the drawings for the artificial gravity system Ethan needed alone filled half the room, not to mention the other drawings, but Ethan didn't mind, he took one paper drawing after another, just because he wasn't an expert on the subject didn't mean he didn't have one, he would just hand them over to the scientists who were full of whims.
He was waiting in the conference room for Reyes to attack the Martian war report when Ethan's men and drawings disappeared, and even the surveillance cameras only captured weird footage of people who were there one second and gone the next.
"Who the hell is this guy?"
"We've won!"
The report of the victory from Mars completely dispelled Raines' suspicions about Ethan, he could conclude that Ethan must have nothing to do with Mars, so Ethan must be a spy for some other force!
These guys had been on the sidelines since the war between SATO and Mars, selling resources to SATO and making a fortune while taking away a bunch of SATO's loot.
But even if he had guessed it what could he do? Raines was technically a member of the Solar Alliance and was on a united front with them.
There were still a hundred unanswered questions, but that didn't stop Raines from enjoying his victory, with the information provided by Ethan, plus the two heavy warships, the Olympus Mountain and the Retribution, loaded with the elite. The whole of Mars was still revelling in the previous string of tactical victories and had no idea that its own main ship had changed masters on a trip out.
Those Mars soldiers were still wondering what had happened when the laser cannon of the Olympus Mountain killed two unlucky Mars destroyers with one shot, and after realising that the Olympus Mountain had mutinied, the Mars home fleet launched a decisive assault, with a sea of Gale fighters pouring out from orbit, seeing that As the Olympus was about to be overwhelmed, the Punisher jumped out with a wave of electromagnetic blasts that wiped out a third of the Gale, followed by an unstoppable swarm of Wolf pilots from Earth's ace pilots that wiped out the rest of the Gale fleet.
Mars, deprived of all air and space power, had no choice but to negotiate a truce, but Reyes, who was in charge of the front line operations, told them that you could only choose to surrender unconditionally, and to make an example of them, Reyes ordered the Mount Olympus to deliver a shot to Mount Olympus on Mars, causing a massive earthquake.
The situation was so disastrous that Mars was in chaos, with the stubbornly resisting faction and the surrendering faction intending to negotiate peace fighting it out first, rivers of blood and heads, and scaring the Earth expeditionary force that was ready to intervene.
So, everything about Ethan was soon left behind by the UNSA headquarters, and only a few dossiers have ever been written about him.
.........
"I'm back!"
Just after Ethan's figure appeared in the secret base on the outskirts of Washington, he couldn't wait to run towards the camera that had been placed there earlier, but to Ethan's dismay, his traversal once again burned out the HD camera.
"It won't film!" Ethan cupped the camera, golden flames of psychic energy gushing from his hand burning it to ashes, then he took out his phone to check up on the missed messages from the time.
He had been in the world of Infinite Warfare for almost a month, and it had only been about three days in the Marvel world, and the ten to one ratio remained unchanged, but it didn't look like the world had been peaceful for the past three days.
Ethan opened the app on his phone and found the news on the front page to be a 'who's he?' headline, along with a very blurry figure underneath it, with blurry flames at his feet.
"Ironman!" Ethan did recognise this one at once, the tawdry Tony Stark had come to the Middle East to see justice because of his inner turmoil.
The New York Times, the Daily Bugle, and CNN all sent out a lot of news stories about Iron Man, praising him for his exploits in the Middle East in addition to a lot of speculation about his identity.
The CNN story was probably the most exaggerated, saying that Iron Man was actually a super-soldier for the Russian army and was there to promote the force and so on and so forth, and after reading the whole story, Ethan said that the story could be reduced to a few words, US army, Congress to fight for money.
There were also a bunch of other stories that said Iron Man was supposed to be some kind of noble knight, out to do justice or something, and the Daily Bugle's guess would be the closest to Iron Man's identity, or maybe their editors just took the Batman template, a rich man who lost both parents at an early age, traumatised by war, and they fussed over a list of examples of a bunch of people who fit the bill, except Tony As to why, the Daily Bugle thinks he is tired enough just dealing with female models all day, how could he possibly go out and become a superhero, instead Mr Justin Hammer is more likely ...
Ethan read the description of Hammer carefully, and the full text was to the effect that if this superhero was not Hammer, then please contact Hammer so that the two could have a deeper cooperative exchange about fighting war criminals and saving civilians.
Ethan didn't even think about sliding down the page, which, without even guessing, must have been a hot story paid for by Justin Hammer.
As for the news further down the page, it was nothing more than a reporter interviewing Dr Samuel Hayden, a weapons development expert for the Altas Corporation, asking for some data on the Iron Man battle armour, and Dr Samuel Hayden stating that a similar prototype Atlas Corporation had already been developed and was being tested for performance.
"Looks like Kate's doing a pretty good job!" Ethan switched off his phone, pulled a thick dust cloth around the equipment, and proceeded to walk out of the safe house.
"Hey Kate, I'm here at the safe house, come and get me!"
"Fuck off!" Came the roar of the female secretary over the phone.
"Got a present for you!"
...
Thirty minutes later, a GM SUV cackled to a halt in front of him.
"Do you know how much has been going on in the last three days?" Kate was all aggrieved before she ran to Ethan, in full view of the Middle East a tawdry gold and red iron man made his appearance with such a big grin, the Escanor Unit who was fighting with the terrorists at the time had not reacted to what was happening, those terrorists were blown up by that guy, such a scene happened for two days in a row, although the military still wanted to keep it secret, pictures and videos of the scene have been sent out by the journalists staying at the base, so now all everyone is looking for the man.
"How's our exoskeleton?" Ethan didn't hesitate to lie down on his secretary's delicate white thighs once he was in the car.
Snap!
A stack of papers was slapped down.
"Well, we've finished the first batch of production?"
"Yes, and as you instructed, Dr Samuels has let the word out! The Ministry of Defence has sent officers over to question us!"
"Well, that's good, let's stock up, it's not time to put them on sale yet!"