Recoil

by David Sherman

  “Pull back, show us where it went,” the Broward County’s captain ordered.

  Another brief finger dance caused the oval to shrink and shift far to one side of the screen. The line that curved into the blinking light extended and eventually straightened out. It terminated at a clearing in a forest that blanketed the side of a mountain range a thousand kilometers from the center of the dotted oval.

  Daly let out a low whistle; he hadn’t expected the Skink base to be so far away from the homesteads. “Can you give us a close-up?” he asked.

  “Sure can.” Tutka’s fingers danced once more and the clearing swelled until it filled the screen. The clearing wasn’t large, less than two acres, but there was no sign of the aircraft that had landed there earlier that day. What was in evidence, though, was a large number of small figures. Daly did a quick calculation and came up with five hundred figures in the clearing. Some of them were standing in small groups, some strolling about. But most lay on the ground, obviously relaxing.

  Tutka snorted. “They look like they’re basking. Makes sense; they’re cold-blooded, aren’t they?”

  “I don’t think so,” Daly said, shaking his head. “At least the one we had as a prisoner seemed as warm-blooded as you or me.” He peered at the screen. “Can you get finer resolution there?” He pointed at the side of the clearing where it came up against a cliff.

  “Easy.” Tutka brought the area Daly indicated into sharp focus. It looked like the mouth of a cave. That was confirmed a few minutes later when some of the figures outside went into the cave mouth and others exited into the open.

  “We need to find out how many are there,” Bhimbetka said softly. “But it’ll take days. And then only if we have sufficient facial-identification capabilities—and we can get sharp enough resolution from the string-of-pearls.”

  “No can do, sir,” Tutka said. “I can work wonders with what we’ve got, but that’s asking too much of the equipment a DE carries.”

  Bhimbetka looked at Daly. The Marine looked back at him.

  “Sir, I have an aircraft planetside. I’ll need your people to run cover for me, keep me from running into any Skink aircraft, while I get a team close enough to run a recon on that clearing.”

  “My ship will give you everything you need, Marine,” Bhimbetka said firmly.

  Twenty Kilometers from the Skink Clearing, One Thousand Kilometers Northeast of Sky City, Haulover

  The small civilian aircraft that Chairman of the Board Miner had loaned the Marines made a safe landing on a remote, unimproved road. They’d gotten there without having to deviate from their planned route. It was a matter of a few minutes’ work for the six Marines to move the aircraft under trees and camouflage it. Ensign Daly knew that because Radarman Second Class Tutka could barely find it, and he knew where it was.

  “All right, Marines,” Daly said once he was assured that the camo job was sufficient, “this is where we earn our keep. Let’s do it.”

  Lance Corporal Skripska crossed the road, following an azimuth toward the distant clearing. Daly followed him, trailed by Corporal Jaschke and Lance Corporal Ellis. Corporal Belinski and Lance Corporal Rudd stayed behind to guard the aircraft. Belinski and Rudd had objected, but Daly insisted that their wounds needed more healing time. He said that the Broward County’s surgeon hadn’t yet cleared them for full duty so he was keeping them on light duty.

  Skripska set a brisk pace for the first twelve kilometers, but slowed down as the four Marines neared the clearing. Skripska used his “eyeballs, Mark I” to watch where he was going; Daly rotated through bare eye, infra, and magnifier; Jaschke used mostly infra, but mixed in bare eye; Ellis, walking backward for the most part to watch their rear, also used infra and plain view. In addition to the visual searches, they all had their ears turned up, and Daly and Jaschke also had motion and scent detectors running in the corners of their HUDs. Daly was also using an electronic emissions detector. The forest they traversed was densly packed with thick-boled trees that sprouted sturdy-looking branches a few meters above the ground. The main branches were often close enough that they nearly touched the branches of other trees, forming a tight latticework above.

  They were less than a kilometer from the clearing before they found sign of the enemy.

  The Skink Clearing, One Thousand Kilometers Northeast of Sky City

  “Freeze,” Daly ordered on the short-range circuit. His electronic emissions detector had picked up something. He tweaked it to get a finer reading and used his magnifier and light-gatherer screens to examine the tree the detector said was the source of electronic emissions. There, about three meters up the trunk of a tree, he could make out a reflection from a skillfully hidden vid lens.

  That’s odd, he thought, vid cameras don’t emit, they absorb. The lens didn’t seem to be pointed at the Force Recon squad so Daly ordered his men to stay in place. He stepped to the side, farther out of the camera’s probable cone of vision, and approached the tree. When he was closer, he discovered the source of the emissions—on the side of the trunk away from the lens was a microwave transmitter. Evidently it was feeding what the lens saw back to the Skink base. He soft-footed back to the squad and led them around the security device. They evaded several more passive detectors before they encountered a live sentry, and Daly had to wonder if he’d been right when he said the Skinks were warm-blooded—the sentry showed less in infra than a human of the same mass would.

  When they reached the point where they could see the edge of the clearing through the trees and undergrowth, they climbed. The main branches, some four meters up the trunk, were as sturdy as they’d looked from the ground, and the Marines were able to easily move along them and go from tree to tree until they were able to see into the clearing with little to obstruct their view. By then each Marine was in a different tree. They settled in for a long watch.

  Over the next six hours, Daly determined that the Skinks rotated in and out at half-hour intervals, about two hundred and fifty at a time, maintaining approximately five hundred outside, looking for all the world like they were basking in the sun. Basking would be necessary if they were cold-blooded. On the other hand, if they lived in caves they might need the exposure to sunlight for the same reasons humans did—to prevent depression and absorb vitamin D. Whatever the reason they were outside, they all went inside at dusk.

  When Fourth Force Reconnaissance Company was tasked with the mission, it hadn’t occurred to anybody that the recon squads might have to come up with an estimate of the number of bad guys if only a few of them were in sight at one time—as had been the case when second platoon made its raid on the heavily guarded installation in the Union of Margelan on Atlas—so they weren’t carrying face-recognition equipment. The Broward County had limited face-recognition capabilities, but its equipment wasn’t man-portable. So Daly had to make an estimate filled with uncertainties. How often did the Skinks come out into the sunlight? Once a day? Every other day? Weekly? Several times a day? He had no way of knowing. He also didn’t know whether it was the only Skink installation on the planet. All he could do was get whatever information he could about the size of the outfit at the cave he’d spent hours watching.

  He prepared a minnie disguised as a Norway brown rat. Ancestral rats had stowed away on the first colony ships to arrive at Haulover, and many escaped into the wild before the first colonists were even aware of their presence. The rats had no natural enemies on Haulover and few local predators found them appetizing so they spread quickly throughout the main continent, where they became pests except in homesteads and other populated areas that took strong measures to keep them in check. Indeed, during the hours he watched, Daly thought he saw a few rats slipping in and out of the cave mouth. He didn’t expect the minnie to be able to transmit from inside the cave to the receiver he carried, so he didn’t attach a vidcam to its shoulders. Instead he set it to record through its eye lenses.

  When the minnie was ready, he let it scrabble down the trunk of the tr
ee he was in and scamper to the cave mouth. Then he put his men on three-quarters watch and settled back to wait again.

  Over the next several hours, the Marines flashed brief messages to one another over tight beams. The messages were just enough to ascertain that they were keeping a three-quarters watch—one man sleeping while the others maintained watch.

  Twice during that time, groups of Skinks came out of the cave and walked into the forest, while other Skinks returned to the cave. Daly assumed that it was a change of the guard in the forest, though he recognized the possibility that they were security patrols.

  Three hours before dawn, the minnie came out and scratched at the base of Daly’s tree. He tight-beamed his squad, and the Marines moved back into the forest before descending to the ground. They returned to their hidden aircraft more quickly than they’d approached the clearing.

  Marine House, Sky City

  Ensign Daly downloaded the minnie’s data and the Marines settled in front of the vid to see what the remote device had found.

  Inside the mountain was an extensive complex of low-ceilinged, interlinked chambers on several levels. Many of the chambers held war machines: smallish armored vehicles, artillery, aircraft of types the Marines didn’t recognize, stacks of munitions, fuel depots, crates with markings that looked too deliberate to be the chicken scratchings they resembled. Huge chambers were filled with what appeared to be foodstuffs, located near what were probably kitchens or other food-service facilities. There was a complete hospital, and more. In short, everything needed to field and sustain at least two full five-thousand-man brigades in the field.

  Moreover, there were barracks chambers, each holding what Daly estimated was five hundred men; there were enough such chambers that they might well have held the five thousand men the equipment suggested. Most of the questions Daly had were now answered.

  But another was raised.

  One of the instructions Daly had given the minnie before he sent it into the cave was a return-by time. The minnie had recorded the entrances to many tunnels it hadn’t had time to explore. Daly had no way of knowing where or what those tunnels led to, but it was reasonable to assume they led to more of the same that the minnie had found.

  There must be the equivalent of at least a division, probably reinforced, under the mountain.

  The Force Recon Marines were going to have to work closely with the Broward County to determine whether there were more cave complexes, and go out on their own to explore whatever caves they discovered.

  Daly took everything his patrol had learned about the Skink base to the Broward County and handed it over to Lieutenant Commander Bhimbetka, who put together a message packet for Task Force Aguinaldo, the minister of war in Fargo, and the Commanding General, Fourth Fleet Marines—the parent unit of the Force Recon Marines on Haulover.

  In minutes, three drones were on their way, and Bhimbetka and Daly began planning how they were going to continue their surveillance and reconnaissance of the situation planetside on Haulover.

  CHAPTER

  * * *

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The Giddings Place, near Wellfordsville, Earth

  Treemonisha Giddings lived alone on her small farm a few kilometers outside the village of Wellfordsville. Alone, that is, with six cats, three dogs, two cows, five pigs, a gaggle of chickens and her vegetable patch. She had lived all her life within fifty kilometers of Wellfordsville, alone since her husband of forty-two years had died and her nine children had grown up, married, and moved away.

  Treemonisha lived off her husband’s life insurance and money her children sent her. That and the things she grew and raised on her farm. She seldom went into town. She wasn’t welcome there. “Too damned ornery, that old gal,” Tanner Hastings of Hastings’s Hardware and General Store would remark, shaking his head sadly, if anyone mentioned Treemonisha. And most of the 653 (plus or minus) residents of Wellfordsville agreed with that assessment. But when Treemonisha made her infrequent visits to Hastings’s store to buy supplies, old Tanner treated her with respect and the hangers-on who could always be found sitting about the trid player he kept going gave her plenty of room. “Don’t do to mess with ol’ Treemonisha,” they’d say, shaking their heads. “She’s got a tongue on her like a rattlesnake’s bite!” So people left the old widow woman alone, and that was the way she preferred it.

  She was left alone, that is, until one morning in late March when a very strange creature showed up in her chicken coop.

  Dr. Gobels’s Laboratory, Wellfordsville

  “We’ve about exhausted all the physical tests we can run on it,” Dr. Gobels remarked to Pensy Fogel one afternoon some days after they’d smuggled Moses into his Wellfordsville laboratory. “Now we’ll see how intelligent it is.”

  Fogel snorted. “Not very. All it’s ever done is squeal since we brought it here.” He nodded at Moses, who was lying inside his cage. “Moses, how old are you?” He winked at Gobels. “God, I have to laugh, calling that thing Moses. Moses, how old are you?” Moses only groaned in response. “See? No need to test it, Dr. G., we already know it’s an idiot.” Fogel laughed harshly. He’d enjoyed probing and sticking Moses and was a little disappointed the physical testing was over.

  “Well, it’s illiterate, so we can’t conduct written tests on it,” Gobels said, chuckling. “How old would you say it is? Age six on the human scale? We’ll administer the Stanford-Binet X and see where it stands on the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence. Take it out of the cage, would you, Pensy?”

  As Fogel opened the door to Moses’s cage, the little Skink scuttled into the far corner and moaned. “Come on, come on, you little shit, time for another anal probe.” Fogel chuckled. He grabbed Moses’s leg. The Skink began to shriek. “Maybe its verbal comprehension is higher than we thought.” Fogel laughed. “Up your ass, you little bastard!” Fogel chortled, dragging Moses out of his cage. Moses clutched at the bars. Exasperated, Fogel stabbed him with a small electric prod that caused him to squeal and lose his grip.

  “Go easy, Pensy! We’ve got to relax it as much as possible. Give it some of that sweet drink it likes. Strap it into the captain’s chair.” The device was a couchlike instrument into which Moses normally was strapped for physical examinations. He began to shriek as Fogel placed him into the thing. “Easy, easy,” Gobels said. “Easy, Moses. No hurty-hurty. Here, drinky-drinky?” He shoved a straw into Moses’s mouth and squeezed a small plastic bottle containing a carbonated beverage. Much of the liquid dribbled down Moses’s chin but he calmed down almost instantly. He’d been conditioned to associate the sweet drink with being left alone for a while since they always gave it to him after the experiments were over for the day. “See, Fogel? Baby wants its bottle!” The beverage was nothing more than a cheap sweetened drink they bought in Wellfordsville, but it contained carbohydrates and nutrients and Moses evidently liked it.

  The testing required a degree of patience that Pensy Fogel lacked, so Gobels administered it himself. When at last the testing was done, Moses was given a light sedative and returned to his cage.

  “Well, boss?” Fogel asked after Gobels had scored the tests. “Where does it stand?”

  “Seventy-five.”

  “I thought so! A few points above a moron!”

  “Umm. Look at these results. On the verbal comprehension it scored very low but on the perceptional reasoning it scored within the normal limits of its estimated age.” In the perceptional reasoning test Moses had been asked, among other things, to put together red and white blocks in a pattern according to a displayed model, find a common bond between pictures displayed in a row, and other tasks of similar complexity. He’d done very well on such tests. In the verbal comprehension tests Moses had been asked the meanings of words, how two concepts are alike, and questions about social situations, general knowledge, and so on. In those tests he had scored very low. “That is to be expected since it was not born into human society, and has been raised by religious fana
tics.” Gobels rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Maybe we should discount the VCI, or weight it differently.”

  “Ah, a moron is a moron,” Fogel replied, looking at his watch. “What do you say we lock up here and go into town for some of that couscous at Mamma Leone’s place?” Mamma Leone’s was the only ethnic restaurant in Wellfordsville and the pair ate there whenever they were in town.

  “All right. Give it another bottle of juice. Add a mild sedative and return it to the cage.”

  “Aw, boss, it’ll only piss it out in there and make a mess!” Fogel said.

  “Let it. It’s its own bed. It can clean it up in the morning. Come on. If we’re going, let’s get going.”

  Moses slept, and when he awakened he found the bright lights had been turned off and the lab illuminated by tiny night-lights placed at intervals along the wall where his cage sat. For once he awoke without noticeable pain anywhere in his body. He listened intently. No one was in the lab and, evidently, the living quarters attached to the laboratory were also empty because he could not hear the low voices or the music that usually emanated from there when Gobels and Fogel had retired for the night. He reached up and gripped one of the metal bars that formed his cage. It was loose. He had been working on it for several nights but that night, feeling much better, he was able to work it completely free. Once that bar was out, others followed until he’d made an opening big enough to crawl through. He found a window he could reach by standing on a bench. It was latched from the inside. He had no trouble figuring out how to release the latch. Then he squeezed himself through.

  It was cold outside and Moses was naked, but that made no difference to him—he was free! He stood shivering in the pale moonlight. A dirt road twisted off among the trees. He reasoned that Gobels and Fogel were away. Fine. He’d follow the road, and if the headlights of a vehicle approached, he’d find cover in the woods.