Terms of Enlistment

by Marko Kloos

  To me, the structure rising from the surface of the planet doesn’t look built at all. There are no visible supports, no protrusions or seams. The surface of the spire looks smooth and uninterrupted. It looks like an enormous tree stripped of its bark.

  “The emergency beacon is five degrees off our bow, four miles ahead,” Halley says. “Right near the base of that.”

  “Just fly around it for now,” the XO orders. “Keep your distance. I don’t want to add another crash beacon to the first one.”

  The patch of calm weather seems to be perfectly circular, and the tall, white structure is right in the center of it. Halley turns the Wasp to the left, putting us on a course that’s parallel to the outer walls of this strange eye in the storm.

  “It shows up on infrared,” she says. “It’s not like a furnace or anything, but it’s definitely throwing out some heat.”

  “Yeah, but what the hell is it?”

  I lean forward to look up through the top windshield panel again. The clouded sky overhead is a little lighter in color that the wall of clouds towering to the left of the ship in the distance, and as I look at the cloud cover directly above the Wasp, I get a sense of swift movement, like a front of storm clouds rushing across the sky in a high wind. The flood of lead-gray clouds is pouring straight out from the center of the storm’s eye, and flowing toward the walls.

  “It’s a terraformer,” I say. “Atmospheric exchanger, whatever they call it. Look at that.”

  Halley follows my gaze with her own, and the XO leans forward over the center console to get a glimpse of what we’re looking at.

  “I think you may be right, Mister Grayson,” he says. “And if that’s the case, I think we’re off this rock for good.”

  He retreats from his uncomfortably stretched position, and settles in a crouch between the pilot seats.

  “It took us fifteen fucking years to build a terraforming network on this rock and get it fit for people to live on. If these things can waltz in here and set up a working network of their own in three weeks…”

  He leaves the sentence unfinished, but I get the sentiment. If this is a working atmospheric exchanger, the alien species is so much more advanced that trying to compete with them for the same real estate would be like showing up at an architecture competition with a child’s erector set and a few rolls of polymer sheets.

  “Let’s get a little closer to that beacon, but be careful.”

  “Aye-aye, sir,” Halley replies. “You may want to buckle in again back there, just in case.”

  We make a wide turn to the right, until the enormous white spire is right in the center of the Wasp’s windshield. The appearance of it somehow matches that of the beings which erected it—tall, thin, graceful, and imposing. Halley does a quick measurement with the optical targeting system of the Wasp, and declares that the structure ahead measures twenty-eight hundred feet from its base to the point where the stem disappears in the clouds overhead.

  “I’m getting the faintest return on radar now,” she says. “I’m going to stop painting it with the beam. Don’t want to piss off the locals.”

  From our position, the spot where the beacon is sending out its regular, mindless electronic wails is on the opposite side of the huge stem. Halley decreases altitude while taking the ship around the trunk in a left-hand turn that gives me a perfect view of the structure. By now, we’re less than a quarter mile away from it, and I can see small imperfections in the surface I hadn’t noticed before, irregular bumps and knots that reinforce the grown look of the spire.

  “Five hundred feet up,” Halley says. “That’s about as low as I care to go, I think.”

  The place where the other drop ship crashed into the planet’s surface is easy to spot. There’s an impact mark on the ground, just a few hundred feet from the base of the spire, and a scorched furrow leading away from the initial mark. At the end of the blackened scar in the rocky soil, there’s a debris field, and the shattered wreck of what was once Stinger Six-One. The remains of the drop ship are mangled so badly that I wouldn’t recognize it if I didn’t know what a Wasp looks like in undamaged condition. Halley makes a low pass over the crash site, and I can see that parts of the wreckage are still burning.

  “See any chutes?” Halley asks.

  “I don’t know. What am I looking for?”

  “The outside of the canopy is camo, and the inside orange. You can use ‘em as signal markers for the SAR birds.”

  I look around the crash site as we circle overhead, but I don’t see anything other than broken and twisted bits of drop ship. When I glance over to the base of the alien structure, I notice something else, however—there are scorch marks and impact splatters marring the surface of the spire.

  “Looks like your buddies tried to take a chunk out of it,” I say to Halley, and point to the damage. She looks over to the stem and observes the impact marks for a moment.

  “Well, shit. So they did. The dumbass Rickman thinks with his balls most of the time. Figures he’d make an attack run on that thing.”

  “Wonder how they brought that ship down. Think they got weapons?”

  “I’m not too interested in finding out,” Halley says. “Let’s get out of here before we do.”

  Chapter 22

  “Attention, all Versailles personnel. This is the XO. Remain at your location, and do not attempt to reach any colony settlements. We have hostile invaders on this planet, and you are ordered to lay low and avoid contact until our rescue ship arrives. I repeat, do not attempt to contact or reach any colony settlements, and do not engage unless attacked.”

  We’re cruising at high altitude, far above the weather, and the XO is broadcasting the same message every few minutes. We have received a few replies from our people stranded below, but the XO has denied all requests for pickups, much to my relief. I don’t want to leave our people stranded, of course, but they’d be no better off in the hold of the drop ship than they are near their escape pods on the ground, and I don’t want to go back into the mess below and discover more bad news. In any case, our remaining fuel is barely enough to get us safely back to the terraforming station where we left the rest of our crew.

  “Talk about a one-sided ass-kicking,” Halley says to me while the XO keeps himself busy with the ship’s radio suite back in the crew chief’s seat. “Our ship’s gone, our colony’s wiped out, and now they’re just setting up shop down there.”

  “I don’t think they even tried to kick our asses,” I say, and shudder at the fresh memory of hundreds of colonists lying dead in the streets of the main settlement, with no apparent injuries, or damage to the buildings. “That place back there wasn’t wiped out. Just fumigated. Like you’d smoke out a bunch of ants in your kitchen cabinet, you know? Toss in a pest stick, come back to mop up the dead stuff later.”

  “That’s a cheery thought,” she says. “Like we don’t even rate real weapons.”

  To our left, the local sun, Capella A, is just about to touch the horizon. The sun looks bigger and more washed out than our sun back on Earth, but the display is still spectacular, like a hydrogen bomb going off in the distance. The sky on the horizon is a brilliant palette of orange, red, and dark purple. I watch my first extrasolar sunset for a while, and it occurs to me that I can’t remember ever having sat down just to watch a sunset back on Earth.

  “Well,” Halley says. “I do hope the Navy’s going to send something bigger than an old frigate to check on us, or there’ll be a bunch more crash pods raining down soon.”

  The night on Capella Ac is black as pitch. There’s no local moon overhead to serve as a planetary night light. As soon as the last sliver of the local sun sinks below the horizon, the world outside disappears. I can’t even make out the ragged line of the horizon ahead of us anymore, and the lack of external visual references makes me disoriented.

  “Put your visor down, and tap the switch on the brow ridge,” Halley tells me when I voice my discomfort. “You got infrared and low lig
ht magnification built into that brain bucket there.”

  As we slowly cross the mountain range, the engines of our ship laboring to keep a few thousand feet between us and the highest peaks, Halley tries to contact the terraforming station that still lies a few hundred miles to our north.

  “Terraformer Willoughby Four-Seven, this is Stinger Six-Two. Do you read, over?”

  I expect another long period of silence in my headset, but the reply from the station comes almost instantly.

  “Stinger Six-Two, I read you. Glad to see you back.”

  “Four-Seven, we are two-niner-zero miles south of you, inbound to land. What’s the weather like down there?”

  “Lousy,” the reply comes. “Heavy rain, visibility less than a quarter mile, winds at three-zero knots from bearing one-eighty. You sure you want to try landing your bird in this mess?”

  “We have nowhere else to go,” Halley replies. I have thirty minutes of fuel left. It’s either that, or putting down in the sticks. Just turn on all the lights for me down there. I’ll find the complex with ground radar, and do the last bit by sight.”

  “Copy that, Six-Two. We’ll keep the lights on for you. Good luck, and be careful.”

  Halley looks at me, and chuckles.

  “’Be careful’? We’re in an unarmed ship, low on gas, on a planet crawling with giant things that aren’t friendly, and about to make a landing in the soup with no AILS, and he tells me to ‘be careful’.”

  “I’m having second thoughts about this Navy career,” I tell Halley. “We make it off this rock, I’ll put in for office duty, or laundry folding. Something low-stress on a quiet space station somewhere.”

  “Fat chance, son,” the XO says from behind our seats. I’m so tired that I didn’t hear him coming through the cockpit door.

  “Hate to break it to you, but we just bumped into the first alien species ever encountered by humanity. We make it off this rock, you’ll be one of the most popular guys in the entire fleet. Once the Intel guys are done with us, that is.”

  By the time we’re over the terraforming station again, I’m definitely ready for a new career in the custodial services, far away from drop ships and emergency crash pods. As we descend through the weather, it feels like the ship is getting shoved around at random in all directions, but Halley is icy calm on the controls, so I once again shut up and try to meld with my seat. Even with the infrared feed from my helmet, I don’t see the lights of the station’s buildings until we’re just a few hundred feet above the landing pad. Then we’re on the ground, before I have a chance to become concerned with our rate of descent. As soon as the drop ship settles on its skids on the gravel of the landing pad, Halley cuts the throttle and exhales sharply.

  “Remind me to log this flight when we get back,” she says. “I’ll put it under ‘Shit Weather Flying’. Thirty-knot winds, my ass.”

  The dash from the landing pad to the nearest building is less than a hundred yards, but by the time we’ve made it into the building, we’re soaked to our bones.

  “I’m wiped out,” Halley says to me as we shake the rainwater out of our hair inside the admin building, leaving puddles on the rubberized floor. “I love flying and all, but holding that stick for ten hours straight is a bit of a bear.”

  “How long has it been since you’ve slept?” the XO asks her. Halley shrugs.

  “No idea, sir. I was just getting off watch when the ship got hit. Twenty-four hours, maybe?”

  “You go find some dry clothes somewhere,” the XO orders. “I’m sure the Marines have some spare fatigues stashed away somewhere. Find yourself some chow and a cot, and crash for a while. That goes for you, too, Mister Grayson,” he adds.

  The terraforming station has living quarters for the techs and the garrisoned Marine squad, but we don’t want to claim someone else’s bed, so Halley and I set up a pair of folding cots in one of the many storage rooms. I’ve been on a steady dose of adrenaline and fear since the Versailles got hit, and I haven’t much felt like sleeping until now, but the relative safety of the warm storage room suddenly makes me feel my fatigue. We lean our rifles against the nearby wall, and exchange our soaked Navy clothes for dry Marine ICUs before lying down on the creaky cots.

  “I’m scared shitless,” Halley says as we listen to the low humming of the environmental system. The cots are short, and far less comfortable than our bunks back on the ship. The blankets are scratchy and smell like they’ve been in a dusty storage locker for the last five years.

  “Gee, I can’t imagine why,” I reply. “Lush planet, friendly locals…”

  “Do you ever stop being a smartass, Andrew?”

  “No, I don’t. You see, it’s my defense mechanism, to cover up the fact that I’m scared shitless, too.”

  “I see,” she smiles. “Glad I’m not the only one. Aren’t we just the biggest shit magnets?”

  “You have no idea,” I say.

  Sometime later, someone runs past the door of the storage room, and I jerk awake. It feels like I’ve been dozing only for a few minutes, but when I check the time, I find that we’ve been asleep for over six hours.

  There’s a rumbling in the air that’s so low I can feel it more than I can hear it. The floor under our cots vibrates almost imperceptibly. Then the tremor is gone, only to return a few seconds later, this time just a little more noticeable than before. It sounds like a very faint earthquake, or artillery shells exploding at a great distance. Something about the low and steady vibrations makes me feel a great swell of unease.

  Next to me, Halley stirs on her cot, and I reach over to shake her awake.

  “Get up, and get your boots on. Come on.”

  The low-frequency vibrations beneath our feet return every few seconds, each time just a little stronger. Each tremor is accompanied by a low rumbling in the air, slow and regular, like the beating of a giant heart.

  “What the hell is that?” Halley asks, her voice still thick with sleep.

  “I think we’re in deep shit,” I reply.

  Overhead, the base alarm starts bleating.

  We put on our boots, grab our rifles, and dash over to the mess hall, where the rest of our little crew is already busy charging weapons and fastening harness straps.

  “Everyone grab a commo kit,” the XO says as we come into the room.

  “What’s the story, sir?” I ask.

  “The Marines up on the roof say we have incoming. They can’t see what it is yet, but it’s coming through the soup from the north. I’m going to go ahead and guess it’s pretty fucking big.”

  Underneath our feet, the floor of the station shakes again slightly, as if to emphasize his statement.

  “Marines,” Corporal Harrison shouts. “Grab some launchers, and let’s get up on that roof.”

  Our Versailles Marines are now wearing partial battle armor-helmets, chest plates, and leg armor, undoubtedly borrowed from the local garrison supplies. They each take a MARS launcher off the tables where the drop ship’s armory is spread out, and then file out of the door at a run. We’re left in the mess hall with a few Navy console jockeys, and a small group of worried-looking civilian techs.

  “Anyone knows how to use a rifle, you best grab one now,” the XO tells the civilians.

  I have the rifle from the drop ship, but I still walk up to the tables with the remnants of the drop ship armory, to see what the Marines have left for us. All the MARS launchers and rocket cartridges are gone, but there are plenty of rifle grenades left. I slip a spare harness over my clean Marine ICUs, and start filling the loops and pouches with rifle magazines and forty-millimeter grenades. Next to me, Halley is doing the same. The civvie techs are just milling about anxiously, eyeing the two of us, and studying the rifles left on the table like some vaguely interesting, but scary artifacts.

  “Where do you want us, sir?” Halley asks the Commander when we have finished gearing up.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” he says. “Find a good spot to use those rifles, I suppos
e. The jarheads are all up on the roof of the main building. Someone needs to stay here and work the comms.”

  “We have a shelter,” the civilian administrator says. “It’s in the main unit, down in the basement level. It’s got its own air supply and comms gear.”

  “Outstanding,” the Commander says. “You civilians go and hole up there. Lieutenant Benning, go with them and make sure someone answers the phone if the Navy shows up and starts calling. The rest of you, let’s go topside and add a few more rifles to the squad. Let’s go, people, before our guests get here.”

  The rain has slacked off in the hours since we landed the drop ship. The roof of the atmospheric processing station is a flat, rubber-coated surface the size of a city block. The wet rubber squishes under our boots as we rush from the access door to the edge of the roof, where the Marines have spread out in fighting positions. Even the short side of the building is at least a hundred yards wide, and the three fire teams spread out along the edge of the roof have an awful lot of empty space between them. The fire team on the right corner is setting up a crew-served automatic weapon, a large-bore machine gun that’s mounted on a tripod, and fed from large translucent ammunition canisters.

  “Friendlies to the rear,” the XO shouts as we come up behind the Marines in the middle of the roof. “We brought you a few more trigger pullers, Sergeant.”

  “Can’t hurt, sir,” Sergeant Becker says. “The more, the merrier.”

  “Where do you want us, son? I’ll let you run your own show here, ‘cause I’m worthless as a ground pounder. You just tell me where to stand, and when to shoot.”

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant replies. “If you wouldn’t mind, just split up your people and pad my three teams.”

  “No problem,” the XO says. “Ensign Halley and Mister Grayson, you go over to Corporal Harrison. Lieutenant Davis and Lieutenant Grazio, you go over to Corporal Schaefer, and do whatever he tells you to do. I’ll stay here with the sergeant and do the same.”