Operation Sierra-75

by Thomas S. Gressman

  Most Marines, Captain Taggart included, seldom wore all the pieces of the combat environment suit. A sealed CES, with boots, gauntlets, and helmet in place was hot and uncomfortable. If the wearer engaged in vigorous physical activity, the odor of his own sweat could become overwhelming.

  Another feature of the suits that most Marines disliked was the small digital video camera mounted on the right side of the helmet. The device was linked to a small digital recorder and liquid crystal display attached to the wearer’s combat harness.

  A goodly number of Marines looked upon the camera as an unwanted hitchhiker at best, and at worst a “Big-Brotherish” intrusion by those they called rear echelon muck flingers. Knowing that any move they made might be scrutinized by officers with backsides the shape of their office chairs tended to make experienced combat troops resentful of the tiny cameras. Generally, they disabled the device almost as soon as they were out of the officer’s line of sight.

  Though Taggart agreed with his troops’ sentiments regarding both the cameras and sealing the suits, on this mission he would brook no playing fast and loose with the regs. Sierra Seven-Five had a hostile atmosphere consisting of a toxic soup of nonbreathable gases. If any of his men or Cortez’s medics got a lungful of this planet’s “air,” little could be done except to dig a grave.

  He also made certain that his troops would not disable their helmet-mounted cameras. Theirs was the first Union expedition to land on Sierra Seven-Five, intentionally anyway. Taggart and the powers that be back home both wanted as much of a visual record of the mission as they could get. In addition, there was still no evidence as to whether the Neo-Soviet Empire had been involved in the downing of the survey ship Cabot. If the Sovs were on-planet, and if they had shot down an unarmed survey ship, they were likely to try to prevent a rescue of that ship’s surviving crew. Visual evidence of the Soviets’ involvement in or innocence of Cabot’s downing would be useful should the issue ever come to a bargaining table.

  After ensuring that his suit was properly sealed save the connection between the suit’s collar and the two-kilo helmet that still lay on the bench beside him, Taggart reached for his weapon. Officially, the weapon was designated Rifle, Assault, M-18. Unofficially, the troops called it the Pitbull for its vicious effectiveness in combat and its consistent reliability under harsh conditions. Following that line of reasoning, the standard infantry sidearm hanging from his belt was generally referred to as a Pug, rather than by its official designation, Pistol, M-43.

  In each of his eight-man squads, five men were armed with the Pitbull. Two others carried the slightly heavier Bulldog support rifle, which was a modified Pitbull with a powerful grenade launcher attached over the 5.56 mm rifle barrel. The remaining Marine, the biggest man in each squad, carried a heavy M-11 Rottweiler light machine gun. Every man in the platoon carried several fragmentation grenades, as well as an updated version of the Ka-Bar Marine combat knife. Only Gunnery Sergeant Frost was the exception to the uniformity of the platoon’s armament. In place of either Pitbull or Bulldog, Frost carried a short-barreled, 12-gauge Jackal combat shotgun.

  At the extreme aft end of the assault boat’s troop bay, the medical team stood in a tight cluster, chatting quietly, in stark contrast to the Marines’ boisterousness. In addition to their individual equipment and medical supplies, each of the medics carried a sidearm. Though the lightweight pistols might not stop a Growler, or Zhykee, the Pugs would be effective enough to buy time to allow a more heavily armed Marine to intervene.

  “Boss? We’re about ready to go,” Gunny Frost said, stepping up to her commander. Beside her was William Stowe, Third Squad’s leading sergeant.

  “Captain, are you sure you want to leave us here?” Stowe asked.

  “It isn’t that I want to, Bill, I have to,” Taggart replied. “I hate the notion of cutting my strength by a third. If there are Neo-Sovs on this planet, and if we run into them, we’re going to need all the firepower we can muster. At the same time, I can’t risk losing the assault boats. If the Sovs find them, you know they’re going to try to capture them or to destroy them. Either way, I want a security team here to protect the boats.”

  “You could just dust them off, and call them back in when we need them,” Stowe countered.

  “Yeah, I thought of that. Problem is, we passed over the wreck site twice before the Gallatin’s sensors picked it up. It may have been a hiccup in the ship’s scanners, or it may have been some anomaly peculiar to this planet. I don’t know if we can trust ground-to-space communications. I’d hate to need a hot extraction and not be able to get in touch with the cavalry.”

  “One other thing, Bill,” Taggart continued, laying a fatherly hand on the sergeant’s shoulder. “If the Neo-Sovs do spot this ship, and they come up in greater strength than you can handle, I want you to dust off and move to the alternate landing zone. If you can’t hold there, then you run for the ship. I won’t take any arguments on this one, you hear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Stowe answered, plainly not agreeing with Taggart’s order, but determined to obey it just the same. “The only thing is, sir, it feels like we’d be leaving you behind.”

  “I know. It feels like that to me, too, like I’ll be leaving your squad behind, sitting on the biggest Union target on this planet.” Taggart shrugged. “Unfortunately, that’s how it’s got to be. If the Neo-Sovs are here and they capture the assault boats, they might use them to attack the Gallatin, or they might just destroy them. In either case, we’d all be stranded on this rock, and I’d rather not have that happen, if it’s all the same to you, Sarge.

  “Look, if you have to displace, we know where you’re going.” Taggart gestured toward the southern horizon. “You can get a message through to us easily enough, and we’ll meet you at the secondary LZ. Twenty klicks is a bit of a hike, but we should be able to manage it. Try not to worry too much about it, Sergeant. Either way, we aren’t leaving anybody behind on this trip.”

  8

  * * *

  L ance Corporal Dade looked at his watch for the tenth time since leaving the rescue team’s landing zone. Nearly two hours had elapsed, and the Marines had yet to locate a viable path through the hills. Many of the possible roads detected by the assault boat’s ground-scan sensors turned out to be false trails. The supposed paths were either not there, or were deemed by the scouts to be too dangerous and difficult for the untrained medical team to negotiate.

  Dade was beginning to think that the rescue party might have to return to the shuttle and either try to find another landing zone or attempt a landing in the narrow rift valley where the supposed wreck of the survey ship lay.

  “Rick, I think I’ve got something here,” Krista Black’s alto voice said in his helmet-mounted communicator. Dade looked up to see his partner beckoning him toward her position, thirty meters to the south.

  “Coming, Mother,” he quipped wearily. Breaking into a trot, he reached her side in a few seconds.

  In an area where the assault boats’ scanners said there should be no path, there was a path.

  No, Dade thought. Not a path, more like a road, a Roman road.

  “Falcon One to Lion,” Dade said, bringing his communicator on-line. “I think we’ve found a way through the hills. It’s not a footpath either, sir. It looks like a regular road.”

  “Falcon, this is Lion. Sit tight, Corporal, we’re on our way,” Taggart answered.

  “Sir, Falcon requests permission to recon the road for a hundred meters or so. It looks intact, but there’s no sense in getting all excited about it, only to have the dang thing vanish in a klick or so.”

  Taggart replied, “All right, Falcon. Mark your spot with a recognition panel, then go ahead and check out the road. Don’t go more than a couple hundred meters. I don’t want to lose contact with you. And remember, we aren’t exactly in a position to give you much support if you run into trouble.”

  “Understood, boss,” Dade answered, grinning behind his faceplate. “Mark
position, and no more than a few hundred meters. Falcon will comply.”

  As he spoke, Dade watched Krista Black rummage around in her small combat pack. A few seconds later, she extracted a packet of blaze orange nylon cloth. Black spread the one-meter-square panel on the ground, weighting it with rocks. The panels were a standard part of the Marines’ kit, and were frequently used to mark friendly positions for aircraft. In this case, the scouts were using it to denote the head of the trail they were about to explore.

  “Ready?” Black asked as she straightened, recovering her Pitbull.

  “Ready.” Dade nodded. “You wanna lead off?”

  Black nodded, and started cautiously up the trail. As Dade waited for his partner to move the normal five-meter interval, he studied the construction of the road. The path was broad and level. It was paved with large, flat, off-white flagstones, which looked like Terran marble. The stones had been fitted with exquisite craftsmanship. If not for the joints, which were too even and regular to be stress or impact cracks, Dade might have believed the road to have been poured in place, like a concrete highway back on Earth. There were stone-lined drainage channels, each a handspan deep and wide, on either side of the road. The whole thing reminded Dade powerfully of the illustrations and photographs he had seen of the roads built centuries before by the Caesars.

  The road sloped gently up into the hills going thirty meters in a straight line before coming to a gentle, sweeping double-back. At that turning, Dade could see the terracing beneath the road. It was difficult to see at first, for the supporting walls and buttresses seemed to be made of natural rock. But a closer examination revealed a graceful organic quality that stone cannot acquire by nature. The same style of architecture seemed to be present in the buttresses and terraces supporting the road as was visible in the rotting buildings in the abandoned city. He felt a chill at that thought.

  “Rick, I’ve got a building here,” Krista Black called over the communicator.

  Looking up, Dade saw his partner crouching in the shelter of a pile of dark red-brown rock that seemed to have broken loose from the cliff face above the road. Ten meters to her front, at the point of a switchback, was a small dome-shaped structure. The building was about five meters in diameter, and it had the same organic appearance as the buildings in the empty city, but it had the off-white gleam of the road’s paving stones. A single low, arched doorway between two round windows gave the structure the appearance of a gigantic skull, half-sunken in the earth.

  “Sit tight, Krista, and keep an eye on the place.” Dade switched communications channels and informed his superior officer of the situation.

  “We’ve just reached your marker now, Corporal,” Taggart said. “Keep the building under surveillance, but do not approach it until the rest of the team is in position to support you.”

  “Falcon will comply, Lion,” Dade replied. “PFC Black reports no movement from the structure, and no sign that anyone has passed this way in a long time.”

  “Understood, Falcon, but my order stands. Keep an eye on the place and wait for us.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later the balance of the rescue team was in place. Captain Taggart deployed First Squad along the road where they could have a reasonably clear field of fire on the igloolike structure. Second Squad and the medics were stationed a bit downhill, away from the immediate area, but still close enough to respond should the situation demand either extra firepower or medical attention. The task of actually approaching the stone hut fell to Black, Dade, and two other Marines from First Squad.

  Dade and Black led the approach while the others covered them.

  If there’s anybody home, Dade thought, they don’t seem to be interested in us, at all.

  The scouts reached the ovoid structure with no incident. Black pressed her back against the curving white wall, her rifle trained on the black arch of the doorway.

  “There can’t be anybody in there,” she hissed to her partner. “If there was, they’d have spotted us a long time before this.”

  “Yep.” Dade’s tone was equally hushed. “But we gotta play this out like there was a whole squad of Neo-Sovs in there.”

  “Yeah,” Black snorted. She pulled a small signal mirror from her combat environment suit’s breast pocket and held it low to the ground, just inside the hut’s open doorway. Angling the rectangular section of reflectorized polymer plastic, she scanned the building’s interior. It was difficult to see inside the building, given the relative darkness beyond its egg-shaped walls. The mirror revealed no signs of life. For a few more seconds, she searched the shadows for movement, or a reflection that might betray an aggressor’s position, but found none. Withdrawing the mirror, she glanced back at her partner with a short, negative shake of the head. Dade nodded his understanding. Using hand signs, he instructed Black to be ready to enter the hut. By pointing at her and moving his hand in a short arc to the left he indicated that he wanted her to enter the structure and sweep to her left. He signaled that he would follow her inside and move to the right.

  Black nodded once, and set herself for the move, her Pitbull at her shoulder, with the weapon’s blunt, ugly muzzle pointed at the ground. Dade mimicked her pose and stepped close to her, with his chest almost touching her back in what was often called a pinch-up formation.

  “Go,” Dade said quietly, and Krista Black exploded into motion. She took one long fast step through the door, bringing her rifle up in line with her eye as she moved. Nothing in the dim interior of the hut responded to her sudden movement. She swept her weapon to her left and quickly moved out of Rick Dade’s path as he entered the building, dodging to his right the moment he cleared the doorway.

  “Clear,” Black said.

  “Clear,” Dade echoed.

  Keeping the Pitbull at his shoulder, Dade reached down with his left hand and pulled a small, powerful flashlight from a thigh pocket. A touch of a button, and the gloomy interior of the stone hut was illuminated with a broad white beam of light. Dade quartered the building’s single room carefully with the flashlight’s beam. There was no sign to indicate the building was inhabited, or had been in the last hundred years.

  A thick layer of yellow-brown dust covered every horizontal surface and drifted like snow against the upward-curving walls. Shelves molded into the stonework and a single stone bench were the only furnishings. It appeared that the dust hadn’t been disturbed for decades. Against the wall farthest from the door was a knee-high stone fence. Dade stepped carefully up to the low barrier and shined his light over the wall. A black hole about a meter across gaped in the floor. Dade’s light would not reach the bottom.

  “Whaddya got?” Black asked.

  “Not sure,” Dade answered with a shrug. “It looks like it might have been a well, or maybe a latrine.” He picked a loose stone from the top of the wall and dropped it into the inky blackness. The rock ricocheted from the pit’s stone side with a loud clack. Dade wasn’t sure if he heard it hit bottom or not.

  “Whatever it is, it’s deep.”

  “Boss,” Dade called, switching communications channels. “This place has been empty since before I was born. If I had to guess, I’d say it was a shelter for travelers using the road.”

  “Okay, Rick,” Taggart answered. “I’m bringing the rest of the platoon up to the house. We’ll take a ten and then Charlie Mike.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later the rescue party continued the mission, “Charlie Mike” as Marine slang would have it.

  A few kilometers uphill from the stone hut, located at the apex of yet another switchback, the Marines came across a series of low stone boxes. Each was about two meters in length and one wide and deep. Each exhibited the sinuous, flowing construction the team had come to expect. The boxes were open to the sky, with a thick layer of dust coating their bottoms.

  “They remind me of flower boxes,” Lieutenant Cortez offered.

  Dade forced himself to smother a laugh, but a second later he found hi
mself agreeing with the Navy doctor’s assessment of the boxes.

  From that point on, the team ran across the “flower boxes” every few hundred meters, and one of the stone huts every kilometer or so. Each was as deserted as the first. But the scouts found signs in the road that suggested the huts were sometimes occupied.

  Eight kilometers from the point where the rescue team began to follow the road, Dade suddenly signaled his partner to stop. Looking around for any signs of a hostile presence and finding none, he dropped lightly to one knee. A deep gouge surrounded by a number of shallower, parallel scrapes marred the surface of a large paving stone. The central groove was as long as his forearm, and a finger joint in depth. He could feel the roughness of the stone where the gouging implement had scraped along its surface. Slight traces of silvery gray material clung to the inner surfaces of the notch.

  A few meters away, another stone was defaced by a similar pattern of scratches. Dade found a third set of virtually identical scars a couple of paces beyond those. Each set of scrapes and gouges lined up with the rest. To Dade, the overall appearance of the scratches suggested that something heavy and metallic had been dragged along the road. The roughness inside the scratches, and the traces of metal still clinging to the scars, indicated that they had been made as recently as a day ago.

  As he knelt to examine the last set of scratches, something caught his eye. Under any other circumstances, he might have missed the object, or mistaken it for a stone. Resting on the edge of the right-hand drainage ditch was a fifteen-centimeter-long billet of rusted iron. One end of the round bar tapered to a point.