Daring

by Mike Shepherd

  This put the Marine captain on the horns of a dilemma. As Kris’s chief of security, he shouldn’t let her out of his sight. As the commander of the Marine company aboard the Wasp, he really shouldn’t let them wander off without adult supervision. At the moment, he needed to be in two places at once.

  Kris had read somewhere about holy people who were supposed to be able to be in two places at the same time. Jack didn’t strike Kris as anything close to holy. She waited for him to make his difficult call.

  “Colonel, neither of my platoon skippers is experienced enough to lead the company,” Jack said. He didn’t have to mention that experienced platoon skippers around Kris tended to pay for that experience by ending up in hospitals somewhere and missing the Wasp’s next movement.

  “This is getting to be a habit,” the colonel grumbled. “But I managed to walk away from the last drop mission. I expect I’ll survive this one.”

  With her chain of command now wrapped into its usual macramé, Kris headed for a launch, leaving one final plea behind her for Chief Beni to discover something. Anything! About the alien site.

  38

  Kris was greeted as she boarded the Fury by a junior officer who admitted that he was personally responsible for maintaining the GACs. He wasn’t surprised that Kris had brought her own maintenance team.

  He was surprised that it was led by a chief and included several petty officers.

  The chief muttered something to Kris about draftee Navies regularly committing heresy by letting officers get their hands on screwdrivers.

  Clearly, Kris was walking a fine line between two different faiths. She would have to keep a tight lid on matters, or a holy war might break out right there in the drop bay of the Fury.

  And she’d come over to the Fury thinking that all she had to worry about was the Longknife/Peterwald thing.

  Silly her.

  The GACs were ugly. They also looked deadly, with their seven-barrel cannon jutting out of their nose. These particular GACs had a thick coat of paint on them that cracked in several places as Kris’s mechanics began going over them.

  “I’d heard that the Greenfeld Navy was more interested in looking good than fighting good,” the chief muttered to Kris when the Greenfeld lieutenant was busy elsewhere. “If you’re just planning on having them sit here and do nothing, a fresh coat of paint will make a hangar queen look pretty, even ferocious, if you paint growling tiger teeth on ’em,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the several craft sporting toothy grins.

  “Are any of them ready to fly?” Kris asked.

  “There’s one in the back. Looks all scratched and dinged up. I think it’s the one they actually fly.”

  “These others?” Kris asked.

  “Look good for inspections and photo ops for the admiral, don’t they?”

  Kris and Jack headed for the back. GAC-7 did look much the worse for wear. The Wardhaven mechs had a half dozen black boxes plugged into several ports and were muttering various incantations over the results that showed on their screens. The belly of the beast was already laid open, and several gizmos and boxes lay on the deck as the lieutenant showed Kris’s chief his small hoard of spare parts.

  The lieutenant came back grumbling. “Your chief. He wants to change out everything. He wants everything new. We don’t have new. Not for this old pig. We have old. Very old. I think old is better for this hog.”

  A few minutes later, the chief came back shaking his head. “I’ve looked in this hog’s logbook. If they aren’t lying, they’ve flown this thing five hundred hours in the last two years. Me, I wouldn’t send my worst enemy out in this thing. Not in this condition. We got to do something here.”

  “Can I fly it, Chief?” Kris asked, as Jack showed more and more alarm at just that prospect.

  “I trained on this stuff back in B school, ma’am, though I’m not sure any of my crew have ever seen this stuff themselves. We got stuff on the Wasp that we should be able to plug into this hog. It won’t be the exact replacement for the crap they have here. The stuff they got here we replaced fifteen, twenty years ago. But, with any luck, our new modules should swap right into these old slots.”

  “Chief, will this be safe to fly?” Jack demanded.

  “Captain, when you launch this hog, I swear to God, if you want me to, you can put a third seat out on the wing of this bird, and I will ride right along with you.”

  “Yeah. And that way, he can fix anything that breaks,” one of the petty officers whispered.

  “I heard that, Betty. I’ll have them strap you under the other wing. You they can drop with the bombs.”

  “I didn’t say a word, Chief.”

  Kris left the sailors to their work. For the better part of the next half hour, she and Jack had a nice long discussion about the stupidity of what she was about to do. As usual, when he had most of the strong points on his side, the argument went long.

  But Kris had the strongest argument on her side. The lives of his and her Marines depended on her having the best possible knowledge of the situation and making the best possible call of where to land . . . or to call the whole thing off.

  Grumbling, Jack finally gave up. “Why did I ever let myself get tied up with a Longknife,” he muttered, and went to check out what flight gear the Greenfeld folks had on hand.

  A good thing, too. He rejected the first four sets offered, then called the chief in to do a thorough workup on the pressure suits that looked best.

  Meanwhile, Kris checked in regularly with her team.

  Chief Beni continued to have no success getting anything out of the alien site. They had hunkered down. Now there was nothing on the radio circuits. The chief could see footprints and vehicle tracks in the dust around the plant, but everyone appeared to have taken cover in the two sprawling buildings. The reactor was producing almost double its original power outputs. Several capacitors were charging up, but if there were lasers, they were still cold.

  “Simply put, I know squat. Professor mFumbo and his boffins on the other ships, they know squat. These folks like to keep themselves a secret,” the chief finished.

  After that report, Kris was not surprised to find out Penny’s persistent efforts to open some kind of communication with the aliens had borne no fruit. She’d enlisted the boffins in her effort. But her distributed brain trust had no more luck talking to the aliens than Chief Beni had taking their pulse.

  “They really don’t want to get to know us,” Jack said, as Kris and he pulled on their green-camouflaged flight gear.

  “Grampa Ray got into a long and bitter fight with the Iteeche because they could not figure out a way to talk to each other,” Kris muttered, half to herself. “Now I’m getting us humans and the Iteeche into a war with someone who will not talk to us, no matter how hard we try.”

  “That’s what it looks like,” Jack agreed, checking the neck gasket of Kris’s suit.

  “Maybe if we can capture someone from this site, we can sit them down and force them to talk,” Kris said, doing the same check for Jack.

  “Somehow, I don’t think hamburger and fries is going to make it happen,” Jack said, as he handed Kris her helmet. “Even if you throw in a strawberry shake.”

  “Yeah,” Kris said. “I’m afraid that if we did capture a few, they’d suicide just like the ship that attacked us. It’s crazy. Someone or something has scared the daylights out of these people. They’d rather die than live as prisoners. The question I can’t figure out is whether or not the fear is for some really honking-huge bug-eyed monster or if it’s what that guy on the video is telling them, and they all believe it?”

  “It would be nice if we could figure out what that dude is saying,” Jack agreed.

  Kris put on her helmet, dogged it down, and chinned the oxygen outlet. Gas whispered into the suit.

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky this time,” Jack said. His own helmet on, their conversation continued as a kind of radio check. “Maybe someone will survive the mass suicid
e. Maybe someone will choose life over death.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping,” Kris said. “Try something often enough, and you’re bound to get what you want.”

  Both the Greenfeld officer and command master chief were there to strap Kris into her strange ride. That was good. She banged her elbow on something hard.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “It’s always there,” the lieutenant answered, telling her nothing.

  The chief ducked his head in the cockpit. “Oh, that’s a crowbar.”

  “Crowbar?” Jack echoed from his seat behind Kris.

  “Yeah, back in the war they had problems getting the canopy open when they crashed. The pilots took to carrying crowbars with them. In the later refits, they actually hooked one to the side of the cockpit.”

  “Don’t worry, Jack. We aren’t going to crash,” Kris said.

  The reply from the guy in back didn’t rise above a mumble.

  Preflight finished, Kris flew GAC-7 over to the Wasp and tied into the drop bay but didn’t leave the craft. The Fury went its way into a geosynchronous orbit thirty thousand klicks above the planet. The other four battleships, along with PatRon 10, dropped into low orbit. The tiny Hermes followed along in their wake.

  The first orbit’s pass showed them nothing new. They dropped probes that only verified that there was nothing to see. Two large, three- or four-story buildings sprawled in front of a steep ridge. The best guess was that a mine shaft of some sort projected down and into the rocky ridge. The best scientific opinion was that the pile of dirt beside one of the buildings was mine tailings, but the analysis of that residue didn’t help them figure out what was going on inside the buildings.

  The landing launches left the Wasp and battleships first. They would descend and loiter west of the site until Kris called them in. Kris detached from the Wasp last. Her descent would be steeper, letting her arrive over the aliens first.

  Kris punched her braking engines, and whispered, “We’re committed.”

  “God help us,” Jack added.

  Kris took the GAC across the alien site at fifty thousand feet, and came away none the wiser for it. She honked the craft around into a steeply descending turn and crossed it again at twenty thousand feet, hammering it with a sonic boom.

  That triggered something.

  “Lasers,” Chief Beni shouted on net. “Rockets, too! I’m getting all kind of search and attack stuff for SAM guidance.”

  Kris slammed her craft into a right bank, then went immediately into a split S turn, diving for the ground at the same time.

  Then the real fun started.

  39

  “Rockets are tracking us,” Jack shouted from the backseat.

  Kris only had time to glance over her shoulder for a second. Behind her, the alien site was obscured by smoke as wave after wave of rockets were ripple fired.

  Most headed up. A few were headed for Kris.

  Kris fired off flares and threw her craft into another S turn. That done, she popped chaff and more flares, then took off into another S, while aiming for the deck and praying her ugly old hog could still take as many gees as the ancient design specs called for.

  The first rocket missed off to her right, but another exploded behind her, knocking her craft around. Like the good hog it was, it kept running, and Kris kept dodging.

  Behind Kris, Jack was doing his best to get a view of the alien site. He slammed his helmeted head against the canopy first to the right, then to the left.

  “I see infantry,” Jack shouted on net. “Lots and lots of infantry deploying from the buildings.”

  There was a pause while he switched sides. “Two battalions. No make that three. Maybe four.”

  Again Kris heard his helmet bounce off the canopy as he changed his viewpoint. “There are vehicles with them. Moving fast. Looks like guns on them.”

  Kris slammed out of one turn, just dodged a rocket, and hurled the old hog into another.

  Jack didn’t pause in his shouting this time. “Abort the landing. They are preparing to oppose the landing with a major force. Abort the landing.”

  “I hear you,” came in the colonel’s calm voice. “The landing is canceled. We will return to orbit.”

  “Don’t go near the alien site,” Kris said. “They’re gunning for us.”

  “Understood. Avoid the alien construction.”

  “Enough of this noise. They are shooting at my ships,” snarled Admiral Krätz. “I will show them you do not fire on an Imperial Greenfeld battleship.”

  Kris coughed as she came awake. There was smoke in the cabin. She could smell it inside her suit. That wasn’t good.

  “Jack, you okay?” she asked.

  “I was wondering when you would rejoin the living,” he said.

  “I’m alive,” she sputtered

  “We need to get out of here.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right.” Kris hit the button to eject the canopy.

  Nothing happened.

  “Ejector doesn’t work,” she said.

  “I could have told you that. Nothing works on this busted bucket of bolts. Want to try that crowbar you and the chief were talking about that we’d never need?”

  Kris glanced at her elbow, not easy with her suit halfpressurized. “It’s not in its holder. Must have come loose when we crashed.”

  “Check at your feet,” Jack suggested.

  The bottom of the cockpit was a mess. “I can see daylight coming in. I think the crowbar busted out when we came down. It’s probably in the mud somewhere up ahead of us.”

  “Won’t help us there,” Jack noted, then went on. “Let’s try pushing the canopy together. On three. One. Two. Three.”

  Nothing happened.

  “Can you climb up on your seat and put your back into that push?” Kris asked.

  “I’ll try.”

  A moment later, Kris was staring at Jack’s butt and shouting, “One. Two. Three.”

  This time it budged. Several more concerted pushes later, and they found themselves sprawled in the mud beside the wreckage of their hog.

  “There’s an emergency kit in there somewhere?” Jack shouted. The smell of fire was getting stronger. Considering that Kris was still on her internal oxygen, it was looking like there was a whole lot wrong with this picture.

  She clambered over Jack, found a bright yellow bag marked EMERGENCY behind his seat, and got it out on the third yank. She did that with no help from Jack.

  She was about to comment on his unhelpfulness but lacked the breath, so she limited herself to doing the best mudsplashing run she could manage away from the now smoking craft.

  Jack tried to stand up . . . and collapsed at his first step. “My ankle’s shot,” he yelped.

  Kris dropped the survival bag and lurched back to give Jack a hand. With one arm around his waist and him leaning heavily on her, they struggled back to the yellow bag.

  Kris grabbed it as they went by. Staggering from one step to another, they slipped and slid for a good fifty meters through the thick yellow mud.

  Then the first fuel cell exploded.

  “How long until the antimatter goes?” Jack asked.

  “It’s supposed to be safe for several days,” Kris said.

  “May I point out that it was provided by a Greenfeld lowest bidder,” Nelly said.

  “Let’s move,” Jack said through gritted teeth.

  They actually started moving fast enough to make splashes. Some small creatures took flight. Kris aimed them off to their right, where a low ridge offered something of a shadow if the antimatter container lost battery backup.

  Beside her, Jack grunted in pain but said not a word in protest.

  A couple of hundred years later, they topped a saddle in the ridge and began to half stumble, half fall down the other side of it. Kris took a last look over her shoulder.

  The old GAC had a cheery fire going, sending up gouts of black smoke. Far across the plain, several vehicles were hurrying
toward the smoke, gun turrets pointed eagerly at the source of the fire.

  “It looks like we got company coming,” Kris said.

  “Well, we did want to talk to them,” Jack pointed out as cheerfully as his pain allowed.

  “Yeah, but not as their prisoners,” Kris said, in her own defense.

  “Kris, what do I do?” Nelly asked. “The aliens blew up their computers when it looked like we’d disabled their ship. Do you have anything to blow me up?”

  “No,” Kris said.

  “I’ve been organizing my own matrix for some time now,” Nelly said. “I guess I could dissolve it. They’d know we had some pretty fancy materials, but they wouldn’t get any information out of me.”

  “Let’s not jump into any conclusions just yet,” Kris said. “Nelly, can you reach anyone? Is there any net?”

  “I can’t pick up a thing, Kris. Not even the Greenfeld battleships thirty thousand klicks above us. We’re on our own.”

  Kris glanced down as they struggled along. Their footsteps and the dragged bag left a clear trail from the smoking GAC right to them. There was nothing Kris could do about that. She might be able to find a rock outcropping. Maybe a cave. Knowing the Greenfeld people, there might be some weapons in the sack she was dragging.

  Kris sneezed. The air in her suit stank of sulfur. What was outside was leaking inside. She sneezed again, clogging her breathing mask and getting junk all over the inside of her helmet visor.

  This planet, like so many others, did not like her. Unlike the others, where she was just unwelcome for political and legal reasons, this one was making it personal.

  Kris raised the visor so she could see. The outside air immediately assaulted her eyes, making them water.

  “That’s not nice,” Kris muttered.

  “My suit’s leaking, too,” Jack muttered.

  Kris paused for a moment. Holding her breath, she did the best she could to clean out her air mask. When she pushed it back on her face, the mucus seemed to help it seal better. That didn’t help her eyes.

  She took a moment to unzip the survival bag. Bad idea.

  The zipper stuck with it halfway open, then jammed up hard there in the middle. Kris used her survival knife to cut the bag open, then rummaged in it for what she could. There were a couple of packages of emergency rations . . . which looked like they were as old as GAC-7, which was to say eighty years. The oxygen bottles looked to be no younger. There were a handful of flares that were mashed together.