The Type 60s were a relatively new class of assault boat. Measuring twenty-five meters in length and twelve wide, the ships were intended to deliver a full platoon of combat troops to a planet’s surface in relative safety. Clumsy fliers at best, the Type 60s were intended for straight in-and-out insertions and extractions. Type 60s were not agile enough to go head-to-head with a fighter or an armed helicopter. Even the paired twenty-millimeter APE chainguns in a remotely controlled turret mounted under the boat’s chin didn’t give the assault boat much of a chance against a dedicated combat aircraft. All they could do was delay the inevitable. No, the chainguns, similar to those used in Ares heavy-assault suits, were primarily intended to suppress ground fire and to give support to the Marines as they entered or departed a hot landing zone. Likewise, the Type 60s could be fitted with bolt-on weapon packs, carrying SPEAR missile launchers, Harbinger rail guns, or even Lucifer plasma cannon. But again, these were ground-support weapons, and the Type 60s would never be anything but troop transports.
The three-man flight crews assigned to the assault boats were technically naval personnel, and therefore under Tamm’s command. In practice, the pilot, navigator, and gunner answered to the naval lieutenant until the boats entered the atmosphere or until they engaged a ship to be boarded. At that time tactical command of the vessel passed to the Marine officer-in-charge, in this case Captain Maxwell Taggart.
* * *
While his men studied and drilled, Taggart had his own set of exercises to which he had to attend. During these sessions with Lieutenants Cortez and Tamm, Taggart pooled his knowledge with theirs in order to formulate an operation plan for searching out the missing survey ship.
“When a spaceship goes down from orbit,” Tamm said, “it isn’t exactly like a plane crash. It’s more like when a wet-water ship sinks, only with a lot more possible problems. Assuming they were not in the atmosphere, and depending upon their delta-V and heading when they went off-line, they might have hit the air at a steep angle and burned up on entry, or they might have skipped off the atmosphere like a stone off a pond. In that case, God knows how far they might have bounced.
“If Cabot was under power and under command when whatever happened happened, it’s possible they made a safe entry. They might have even been able to manage a reasonably intact landing, if they found smooth, level ground. I’m betting they did, or at least that they crash-landed. If they burned up, they wouldn’t have been able to transmit that last shout for help. It’s possible they bounced off the atmosphere and are lying dead in space somewhere, waiting to be picked up, but I don’t think so. Call it ‘spacer’s intuition’ if you like.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you. Though it has nothing to do with ‘spacer’s intuition.’ That last message you mentioned; as badly broken up as it was, this fella Michelli seemed in a genuine panic. He said ‘they might come back,’ or at least I think that’s what he said. I doubt he meant his crew, don’t you? It’s my guess he meant whoever shot the ship down, be it Neo-Sovs, Zhykee, or some other race we know nothing about.”
“Even if that’s so,” Cortez put in, “does it automatically mean they’re on the ground? I mean, couldn’t he have meant a boarding party, or raiders, or something like that?”
“Perhaps, but unlikely,” Tamm answered.
“Right,” Taggart stepped in. “Raiders or pirates usually hit their target, disable it, board her, and strip her bare all in one operation. They don’t often leave anything behind for a second trip. Now, if Cabot is on the ground, the bad guys might have boarded and looted her, but may not have had the carrying capacity to haul everything away at once. Besides, Michelli said, ‘Cabot is down.’ That indicates, to my mind at least, that she is down on the planet’s surface.”
“Oh,” Cortez said. “So what’s your plan for locating the missing ship then, Major?”
“Not mine,” Taggart responded, somehow pleased that Cortez had thawed enough to call him by the honorary rank tradition granted him, rather than calling him by his actual title. “No, this is Levi’s show.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it my ‘show’ exactly,” Tamm responded. “After all, no one in the service really has much experience at this sort of thing.
“What I figure on doing is adapting the search techniques used by the wet-water Coast Guard. We’ve fed the data from Cabot’s last telemetry feeds into the navigation computers. That way, we should be able to follow her course fairly closely, at least up to the point she disappeared. After that, it becomes sort of grunt work. Using the area in which she vanished, we’ll start a quarter and search pattern. The Gallatin is fitted with some fairly sophisticated sensors: ground-scan radar, thermographic imagers, magnetic anomaly detectors, high-resolution video cameras. And we’ve got the frequencies of Cabot’s distress, cockpit voice, and flight data recorder beacons. One way or another, we should be able to find her.”
“And how long will that take?” Cortez asked, a touch of acid in her voice. “If I remember the probe reports on this planet correctly, Sierra Seven-Five has a hostile environment. Its atmosphere is predominantly carbon dioxide and ammonia. Cabot has been down for eighteen days. What kind of survival gear does she have? Could her crew survive this long? And how much longer can they last?”
“Not only that, Doctor,” Taggart put in. “We have to assume the presence of hostiles on Sierra Seven-Five. Remember Michelli’s last transmission. ‘Can’t last long. They might come again. For God’s sake, hurry.’ I’m worried if we take too long in locating the ship, there may be no one left to rescue.”
Tamm’s perpetual grin faded a bit as he shrugged. Taggart got the definite impression that this was as close to an expression of despair and resignation as the young lieutenant could come.
“I don’t know what more to tell you. We can try to project a flight path based on Cabot’s speed and heading at the time of her disappearance, but beyond that, unless we get real lucky, it’s going to come down to a standard search program.”
* * *
Over the next eight hours, it seemed that the rescue party was out of luck. The Gallatin followed Cabot’s flight path straight to the spot where the survey ship vanished. Trusting to the luck that sometimes favors the bold, Tamm continued on the projected course he had described to Taggart and Cortez. By the time the rescue cutter stood over the spot where Tamm’s projections said Cabot should have crashed, the Gallatin’s sensors had gone off seven times. Each time the readings were inconsistent with the scanner profile of a wrecked spacecraft. Still, each time the cutter was required to stand to while her sensor operators refined their search. Each time, the results were disappointing.
“Dammit,” Tamm cursed, slapping the back of the sensor operator’s chair. The vigorous action caused him to wobble a bit in the free-fall environment of the bridge. The strain of eight hours’ fruitless search was quickly eroding the naval officer’s persistent good humor.
“What now?” Taggart looked up sharply from where he was slumped in the corner of the bridge, studying a printout of the surface map the Gallatin’s computers had generated from the sensor scans. The unproductive hunt had left Taggart just as worn as Tamm, and he lacked the lieutenant’s ingrained cheeriness.
“Now, nothing,” Tamm answered, getting his irritation under control. “For the last eight hours though . . .”
He sighed.
“Our biggest problem is the reason Cabot was sent to this damn rock in the first place. The planet’s surface is dotted with all kind of structures. We can’t ‘turn down the gain’ on the sensors, or we might miss Cabot or her wreckage. So, every time we pass over a cluster of those damn buildings, the sensors go off, and we have to stop to check them out. We’ve had seven hits in the past eight hours.” Tamm grinned at last, then shrugged. “It’s getting a little frustrating.”
“Captain,” the sensor operator called out, “I’m getting a new reading, a power source, a big one.”
“Where?” Tamm asked, turning to ex
amine the scanner display.
“Fifty miles, at two-eight-six relative,” the tech answered. “The contact is fairly strong and constant, no fading in and out.”
The Gallatin’s skipper peered at the square, flat-screen monitor. A small white dot glowed steadily a few centimeters from the left-hand edge of the display.
“Whaddya think, Mort?”
“Can’t say for certain, sir,” the sensor operator replied. “This could be it. The contact is certainly big enough to be a ship’s power plant. Maybe Cabot didn’t crash. Maybe she made a hard landing, and her plant is still operational.”
“Could be, Mort, could be. Well done.” Tamm patted the tech on the shoulder, in a gesture far more congratulatory than his previous annoyed slap on the back of Mort’s chair.
“Navigator,” he continued, “give me a course toward Mr. Chalom’s contact. Major Taggart, you may want to assemble your men. This could be it.”
4
* * *
“L ion, this is Falcon, we are in position and ready to begin our reconnaissance, over.”
“Falcon, Lion. Go ahead, Rick, just watch yourselves.” Captain Taggart’s voice sounded clearly through the helmet-mounted radio transceiver.
“Roger, Lion. Falcon is on the move.”
Switching his helmet-mounted radio transceiver to standby mode, Lance Corporal Richard Dade turned to his partner, gave a jerky tilt of his head, and said, “Okay Krista, lead off.”
Behind the closed faceplate of her combat environment suit, Private First Class Krista Black grinned broadly. Hefting her Pitbull assault rifle, she slipped from the shadow of the ruined wall beneath which the Marine scout team had been sheltering. As she moved, Black activated the miniature video camera attached to the left side of her helmet. The device, set on a level plane with her eyes and provided with its own audio pickups, would record everything the scouts saw or heard during their reconnaissance.
As it turned out, the power source detected by the Gallatin’s sensors was located close to the center of what had once been an urban area. The closely packed buildings made it impossible to set the assault boats down inside the city, so the Marines had grounded about a kilometer from the easternmost edge of the ruins and hiked in to their target. As the platoon’s scouts, Dade and Black led the way.
Krista Black moved carefully along a broad, flat expanse of dust-covered ground that, in any human city, would have been called a street. But this was no human city. Although they seemed to be made of stone or concrete, the buildings had an odd, almost organic quality to them. Though most of the buildings’ outer surfaces had been scoured to a clean off-white finish by time and blowing dust, enough pigment remained to suggest that they had once been painted in pleasant shades of green and blue. To the scouts, the ruined structures were still far more beautiful in comparison to the harsh, angular lines and flat grays and metallics of human architecture.
As she passed the yawning darkness of an open entryway, the door of which had long departed from its hinges, she glanced inside. The building’s furnishings had the same organic look to them, and seemed to be part of its structure, installed or grown right along with the rest of the squat pale blue edifice.
A house, she decided, with no more evidence than her own intuition. It has the feeling of someone’s home. With a touch of sadness, she turned her back on the abandoned building and moved on.
Moving only fifty meters or so at a stretch, Black paused briefly to watch and listen. A half dozen meters behind her, on the opposite side of the street, Lance Corporal Dade followed suit. Nothing moved in the ruins except the fine mustard-colored dust, stirred by the faint breeze. No sounds reached their ears other than the faint hissing of grit as it drifted against the abandoned buildings. Whoever had built, or perhaps grown, this fantastic town, they had found some reason to leave it long ago. Nor were there any traces of animal or plant life. The city was dead.
Moving like a hunting cat, Black carefully, instinctively picked places that were firm and would not shift to set her feet. Her eyes were never still. They constantly flicked from side to side, and up and down, searching for any sign of a threat. The muzzle of her Pitbull followed her gaze. At random intervals, she slowed her steps, not quite pausing. In these stretched-out moments, she twisted her head, looking back over her shoulder to make sure her partner was still in his accustomed place behind her and to her right.
As she moved, Krista Black spared one brief glance at the positioning-system display, which was part of the electronics package built into the back of her left gauntlet. Not as sophisticated or precise as the global positioning system she was used to using back on Earth, this system used only basic triangulation to help keep the scout team on track. The unit kept track of the scouts’ destination, current position, and the location of their grounded assault boats, and processed the information through the Gallatin’s sensor and navigation computers. As long as the assault boats remained grounded in one spot, the scouts could remain on a straight line toward their destination. If they wandered too far off course, the tiny dot that represented their position would diverge from the electronic path drawn on the display screen, prompting them to return to the proper course. The system was far from perfect, but it was better than stumbling around blind, trying to navigate with a map generated from sensor scans and a compass that might not work on this alien world. According to the positioning system, they were dead on track for the power source that was their goal.
A few hundred meters from the city’s edge, Black came to what might have been an intersection. There she paused, dropping back against the base of a graceful, bottle-shaped building. Dade moved quickly into position across the street from her shadowed hide. For long moments, the scouts remained still, searching the cross street for any signs of a threat. Eventually Black nodded at her partner, who returned the gesture. Moving quickly, but without any sign of hurry, Dade writhed sinuously to his feet, and, without a break in that motion, crossed the street in a smooth, easy trot.
Again, the lance corporal dropped into the shadows of an abandoned building, watching and waiting. Nothing moved but the windblown dust. Another pair of quick nods were exchanged, and Krista Black darted across the street. As she moved, Black felt the muscles of her upper back twitch and tighten, almost as though her body had perceived an attack and was taking the useless defensive step of tensing up against the smashing effect of an incoming bullet. But the bullet never came. Black reached the shelter of an elegant spiral violet obelisk. The structure seemed once to have been some sort of artwork or monument, though what it represented or commemorated was a mystery. The upper third of the obelisk lay broken in the street. The scouts could not have reached around the monument’s base if they had stretched their arms so far that only their fingertips touched. The stone of the monument, if it was stone, showed a distinct glitter where the pigment had been worn away. Black examined the material closely, seeing small clear blue crystals embedded in the cementlike material. Even in its ruined state the obelisk retained a compelling alien beauty.
Krista Black was a trained scout who was good at her job and enjoyed it, but this was one assignment that she had always hated, reconnaissance of a city. The hard pavement held little trace of an enemy’s passage, and the concrete-and-steel mazes of buildings and streets gave the enemy his choice of hiding places from which he might eliminate opposing troops with little risk to himself. As she crouched in the lee of the spiral monument, the scout berated herself for becoming distracted by the city’s alien beauty. That inattention could have cost her life and that of her partner. Black suppressed a shudder at the thought.
Looking across the street, she nodded at Dade, who returned the gesture. Getting to his feet again with that almost-boneless grace, Dade stepped off carefully down the street, taking the lead for this leg of the journey. When he had gone a half dozen meters or so, Black followed, keeping her interval and concentrating on the job at hand.
As the scouts penetrated deeper i
nto the dead alien city, a sense of foreboding began to settle over Krista Black. The city she had once found so strikingly lovely had become strangely hateful to her. Though she was not given to flights of fancy, the graceful lines and organic curves of the buildings began to remind her of fungi and molds. The faint traces of color against the colorless stony material took on the appearance of decaying flesh over bleached bone. No touch of the breeze that stirred the dust at her feet could be felt through the armored environment suits, causing in Black an odd feeling of breathlessness. The overwhelming stillness of the city made her think of an empty tomb.
Perhaps it had been the uncomfortable realization that she had not been one hundred percent attentive to her job, and that such carelessness could have gotten her killed, that had caused the discomfort. It could also have been that odd sixth sense that good recon scouts seem to be born with. Whatever the reason, an odd prickling sensation ran the length of Black’s spine, causing her to freeze in her tracks. Clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth, she drew Dade’s attention via the short-range radio communicator in her helmet.
Her partner froze, turning his head just far enough to see her. Black could imagine the questioning expression on his face. She had seen it enough times both in training and in combat situations. His posture spoke of a coiled readiness either to fight or flee. She could feel a similar tension in her own muscles.
But Black noticed these things only peripherally. Her whole being was focused on her eyes and ears, as she strained to discern what had triggered her heightened state of readiness. Nothing moved around them. Even the faint breeze seemed to have died away. It was almost as though the city itself was watching them.
Then she heard it—a faint, low-pitched moaning sound. At first Black thought maybe it was the breeze muttering around the corner of a ruined building, but there was no breeze. She brought her left hand up, cupping her palm next to her ear, but the gesture wasn’t needed. Lance Corporal Dade heard the sound, too, and was scanning the area, straining to locate the source of the oddly musical groan.
Operation Sierra-75 Page 3