Black consulted the positioning system again. According to that instrument, they were less than two hundred meters from the power source. Looking back to Dade, she held out her left hand, palm upward in the age-old gesture meaning, “What now?”
Dade returned the half shrug and gave a short wave forward.
As she advanced, the moaning grew louder. As she got closer, Black could tell that the sound was not a constant note, but it rose and dropped in pitch in a random pattern.
Twice more, the Marine scouts crossed intersecting streets as they pressed on toward their goal. One of those intersections boasted a small square, the center of which was clogged with a low pile of rubble, as though a statue had been demolished and the broken shards left where they fell. Each time they crossed a street, the scouts switched off lead and trailing positions. In this way, they would minimize the draining effect on their senses of always being on point.
As they approached a third intersection, Dade, who was in the lead at the time, stopped short. His left arm came up in a clenched fist, signaling Black to do the same.
“Movement,” his voice whispered through the helmet communicator. Black looked at her teammate to see the splayed fingers of his left hand pointing to the team’s left. Black signaled her acknowledgment and began creeping forward again, as Dade signaled her to join him. With her rifle held at low ready, its buttstock already nestled against her right shoulder, she sidled along the dust-covered street until she drew even with her partner. While she moved, Dade had brought his Pitbull to his shoulder and was covering her end of the cross street. Blanketing every sound she made, and seeming to blend with them, was that damnable moaning.
Black set her back against the flowing curve of a building’s cracked and dust-scoured wall, her muscles tensed for action and her senses straining to filter out the ever-present howl. She looked across the street at Dade, waiting for his signal.
Dade gave a short, jerky nod. Black pivoted around the corner, dropping to her right knee as she moved. Her rifle came up into firing position, its elevated sight-rail aligning with her visor-shielded right eye. Before her was a broad, open square, larger than any they had passed before. In the center of the square was a large, intricate-looking sculpture.
The object stood well over three meters tall, and seemed to be constructed entirely of metal, which appeared to have been anodized in pleasing, soft shades of green and gold. Several windmills of different sizes turned in the faint breeze. This had been the motion that had first attracted Dade’s keyed-up attention. As they spun, the vaned wheels operated elaborate sets of chain pulleys, which in turn caused a series of wheels to turn against thin sheets of metal. The friction of wheel against metal sheet created the haunting moan that had been setting the scouts’ teeth on edge.
Krista Black examined the sculpture closely, using her helmet minicam to record the alien artifact for later review. The recording system in the camera had enough digital memory to record sixty minutes of action before it would have to be downloaded into a permanent storage medium. If the data was not saved, the camera would record over the previous images.
A few pieces had fallen away, apparently the result of age, weathering, and neglect. What remained intact seemed to be in near-new condition. Black plucked a scrap of green metal from the dust at the object’s base. Though as long as her hand, two centimeters wide and half a centimeter thick, the fragment weighed almost nothing. The faded green color seemed to go all the way through the metal’s thickness. Her curiosity piqued, she tried to bend the green metallic strip, but found that, even exerting all her strength, she could barely flex the shard a few degrees. When she tried the tip of her heavy Ka-Bar combat knife against the fragment, she discovered that the knife’s cryogenically hardened edge barely scratched the surface.
Suddenly, the off-key moaning stopped.
* * *
Private Black dropped the metal shard and clutched at her Pitbull, where it hung from a cross-chest assault sling. At the edge of her vision, she saw Lance Corporal Dade doing the same.
“What is it?” Dade whispered harshly.
“I don’t know,” Black answered, apprehension and curiosity mixed in her voice. “The noise stopped.”
“You bet it did,” Dade laughed.
As she turned to look at her partner, she saw him rise from his crouch behind the sculpture’s stone base. He gestured to an axle in the central part of the object’s works. A large chunk of stone was wedged between the spindle and a thick golden chain.
“Dammit, Rick! Why the hell did you do that?” Black spat. “You scared the hell out of me!”
Dade blinked in surprise at her uncharacteristic outburst. In all the time the scouts had been working together, he had never known Krista Black to raise her voice. Now here she was ripping him a new orifice over the insignificant matter of his jamming up the sculpture. Truthfully, he wasn’t certain why he had done it.
“Look, Krista,” he said apologetically, “that noise was beginning to get on my nerves. In fact, this whole damn city is getting on my nerves. What the hell happened here? Where is everybody? We haven’t seen a soul. Fer cryin’ out loud, we haven’t even seen a body. What? Did the whole population of this God-cursed rock wake up one morning and decide to leave? And then there’s that.”
Black came around the sculpture to look closely at the stone her partner had wedged into the statue’s works. Two sides of the elongated pyramidal rock were featureless and rough, suggesting that the dark gray shard had been chipped out of a larger stone. The third was finely carved. A strangely human-looking face was carved in the midst of odd, squiggling figures which could have been some kind of writing. But the face, so beautiful and lifelike, wasn’t human. In the place where a human’s eyes would be, there writhed two pockets of short, bright green, tentacle-like antennae. Black stepped back, feeling a faint twinge of revulsion.
“Oh, that’s ugly,” she said, blowing out a long breath. “Do me a favor, Rick. If you’re gonna do anything like that again, just let me know first. This whole mission’s spooky enough. I don’t need any more thrills.”
“Hmm,” Dade grunted. Without saying another word, he moved away from the now-silent sculpture, toward the recon team’s goal of the unknown power source.
5
* * *
A s the scouts left the odd, “musical” sculpture behind, Private Krista Black began to feel better. She was forced to admit that Dade had been right about the eerie, discordant moaning the object generated. Something in the pitch or frequency of the low, mournful groan had scraped along her nerves like broken glass. Now that it had been silenced, she seemed a bit more relaxed and able to concentrate on the task at hand.
Ten meters ahead, Lance Corporal Rick Dade stopped, dropping to one knee in the shelter of a high-arched doorway, his Pitbull assault rifle held at low ready. Black faded back a half step, slipping quietly into a similar entryway on the opposite side of the street from the scout team’s point man.
Dade held his place, remaining still. Krista Black mirrored her partner’s motionless stance. Only her eyes swept from side to side, carefully searching the area for a potential threat. Twice she spared a glance for her positioning unit. According to the tracking device, Dade should be right on top of the mysterious power source.
Long seconds ticked by, stretching into minutes, and still Dade held his position. Eventually, he half turned to face her. Bringing up his left hand, he shaped his fingers and thumb into a large O, following the gesture by pointing off down the street. Black nodded, understanding the gesture to mean “objective in sight.”
“Lion, this is Falcon,” she said, quietly switching her communicator over to the platoon’s tactical frequency. “We have reached the objective.”
“Falcon, this is Lion,” Taggart responded. “Any signs of our people?”
“Negative, Lion,” Dade answered for her. “Objective is not, I repeat not, Cabot. Objective appears to be an industrial building. Falcon requ
ests instructions. Suggest you allow us to go inside and check it out. Could be that some of the survivors are sheltering inside.”
“Lion concurs, Falcon,” Taggart said a few moments later. Clearly the captain had been considering the scout’s request, perhaps even discussing the wisdom of entering the unknown building with Gunny Frost. “Just be careful. I don’t want to lose anybody, especially if this is a false alarm.”
“You got it, boss,” Dade said. “Okay, Krista, let’s move in.”
Black moved up to cover her partner, as he stepped out. At first glance the building Dade was approaching was unimpressive, unlike all of the buildings the scouts had seen so far in the abandoned city. The windowless structure was long and low, roughly rectangular in shape, instead of having the soft, almost-organic form they had come to expect. It lacked the pastel colors of the other structures. Instead it was painted a flat gray. Overall, its appearance reminded Black of an ammunition storage bunker or a hardened aircraft shelter.
Dade reached the structure’s only visible door without incident and motioned for Black to join him. As she moved across the narrow open space between her last hiding place and the bunker’s shadowed doorway, she felt that sensation again. Taking one long step, she turned around in midmotion, walking backwards a few steps, searching for the enemy sniper her disquieted intuition told her had to be there. She saw nothing other than the tall, spiral, and fluted buildings she had been seeing ever since they entered the city.
“Dammit,” she cursed, reaching Dade’s position without incident. “This is getting out of hand. Let’s just check this frigging building and get the hell out of Dodge.”
Black stopped short, surprised by the vehemence of her tone. Whatever it was about the deserted city that had caused Rick Dade to disable the sculpture was beginning to affect her, and she didn’t like it.
“Right.” Dade nodded. Hefting his assault rifle, he reached out with his left hand and gave the bunker’s blackened metal door an easy shove. Much to Black’s surprise, the panel yielded to the gentle pressure and swung wide without a hint of squeaking hinges. The space inside was dark. In the weak light filtering in from outside the scouts could see indistinct, rectangular shapes, some of which gleamed or shone with reflected light.
Dade brought his weapon to his shoulder, as Black drew a small, powerful flashlight from her environment suit’s right breast pocket. She held the light at shoulder level, as far away from her body as she could reach. Black knew if anyone was inside the darkened building, they would be more likely to shoot at the light than anywhere else; thus, she kept the flashlight as far away from her vital areas as she could. The light’s powerful beam pierced the gloom, falling on some sort of control panel. Shining the light around as much as she could without leaving the partial protection of the doorjamb, she ascertained that there were no living creatures, hostile or not, inside the bunker, at least none that she could see.
Cautiously, Black slipped around the jamb, moving quickly to keep from being silhouetted against the brightness outside. She moved to her left, putting her back against the structure’s outer wall, scanning the space within. The bunker contained one large room, dominated by hulking, shadowed devices, the purpose of which she could only guess. Nothing moved in the darkness.
“Clear,” she called to Dade, who moved through the door quickly and smoothly, sweeping to the right, as she had swept to the left. The combined illumination of their flashlights banished the worst of the shadows. Aside from the Marines, there was no sign of any being, living or dead, inside the structure. Krista Black crossed and recrossed the bunker’s single room, searching for a door, or passageway, or basement, but found only alien machinery and dust.
“Rick, what do you suppose all this stuff is?” she asked at last, jerking her thumb at a pair of big cylindrical devices in the center of the room.
“If I had to take a guess?” Dade responded. “I’d guess this is a power station, probably geothermal.”
“Really,” Black shot back acidly. “And how did you figure that one out?”
“Well, I may be wrong, but I don’t think so. Y’see, my dad used to work in a geothermal station, back before everything went to hell. He took me to the plant a couple of times, and it looked an awful lot like this. Those cylinders over there are probably the generators themselves. If they are, they might be still in operation. That might account for the power source the Gallatin’s sensors picked up. But if they’re running, they’re running awful quiet.
“And that’s not the funniest thing about this whole place,” Dade said, gesturing for Black to join him at the control panel he’d been examining. “Look here. I have no idea what these gauges indicate. What’s strange is the fact that they are gauges. Not digital readouts, or computer displays, but plain, old-fashioned needle-and-dial gauges. But all the controls seem to be touch pads. And here? This looks like a palm reader of some kind. Advanced control units, but antique gauges to monitor the system. Weird.”
“This whole bloody planet is weird if you ask me,” Black said, leaning closer to look at the devices her partner indicated. The control panel was covered with more of the odd, scrawling lines that crisscrossed the rock Dade had used to jam the sculpture. Some of the character strings reminded Black of Celtic knotwork; others seemed to be almost-hieroglyphic representations of people, plants, and animals. The device Dade called a palm-reader was in the center of an otherwise unadorned panel. Made of some kind of black plasticlike substance, the reader was almost the size of a dinner plate. The hand outline in the center of the device had six overlong fingers and two opposable thumbs.
“Yeah, weird,” she said, straightening up from the panel. “Ain’t nobody here, Rick.”
“Yep, I guess you’re right.” Dade agreed. He opened a communications channel.
“Lion, this is Falcon. No joy. I say again, no joy. I think what we’ve got here is some kind of power-generating station. That must be what the Gallatin’s sensors picked up on. There is no sign of life here, Captain. This place has been deserted for an awful long time.”
“Falcon, Lion copies co . . .”
The rest of Captain Taggart’s message went unheard. Alerted by some sixth sense possessed by all reconnaissance scouts, Dade and Black dropped into virtually identical defensive crouches back-to-back, pointing their rifles into the deep gloom of the station. It did not take long for the Marines to realize what had triggered their combat-honed responses.
A thin, low-toned moaning came from outside the station.
“I thought you jammed that blasted thing,” Black hissed.
“I did,” Dade shot back. “Somebody must have unjammed it.” He said quietly, “Lion? Falcon. Are any of your people in the city?”
“Negative, Falcon,” Taggart said, sounding surprised. “Nobody left the rally point while you were running your recon. Why?”
“Stand by, Lion,” Dade replied. “We may not be alone here.”
After checking the doorway and the area immediately outside the power station, the scouts scuttled out of the long, low bunker, moving one at a time, covering each other’s back as they crossed the fivescore meters between the generating station and the large square, wherein stood the musical sculpture.
From her position behind a low, pastel blue stone wall on the edge of the square, Krista Black could see the sculpture easily. Its windmills were once again turning in the faint breeze, the thin sheet-metal panels setting up their low, keening wail. Nothing else in the square was moving.
Cautiously, the Marines crossed the open plaza, eyes and ears alert. No trace of any living creature could be seen. When they reached the sculpture, they found no tracks in the thin dust other than their own. Dade looked around for the rock he had jammed into the mechanism, but could find no trace of it.
“C’mon, Rick, it can’t be. There’s no tracks. Even with what little breeze there is, there hasn’t been enough time to cover our tracks, let alone anyone else’s. No one came in here and took yo
ur rock away,” Black said, gesturing at the yellowish dust, innocent of any footprints save their own. “It must have just worked itself loose and fallen down.”
“No way, I had it wedged in there good,” Dade shot back. “Even if it did fall out, where is it? Remember that face? None of the other rocks around here have carvings like that. None of the rocks around here are that color. So where did it come from in the first place, and where is it now?”
“Rick, look for yourself. There ain’t nobody here but us. It had to have just fallen out,” Black said again. Despite her assertions, she felt a qualm. She knew that, if the rock had simply fallen out of the sculpture’s works, it should be lying in the dust beneath it. Yet there was no trace of the stone. That meant someone had intentionally pulled the rock out of the mechanism, but why? And who? The absence of tracks in the thin yellow dust immediately conjured up visions of noncorporeal beings who passed by with no trace, and yet could affect physical objects.
“We better call this in,” Dade said, and opened a channel.
“Are you certain?” Captain Taggart asked after listening to Dade’s story.
“Yessir, I am,” Dade answered. “There’s something going on out here. We are not alone.”
“All right, run a sweep,” the captain said. “Search a five-hundred-meter radius from the sculpture, but don’t dawdle. If you’re right, I don’t want you two poking around in there after nightfall.”
* * *
Two hours later, Dade and Black were on the final leg of their sweep. The scouts had checked every avenue of approach to the square and had examined a dozen possible signs, but had found no trace of any being. Both Marines were about to concede that the stone might have fallen from the mechanism by itself and gotten lost in a dust drift, when something caught Krista Black’s attention.
Operation Sierra-75 Page 4