Operation Sierra-75

by Thomas S. Gressman

  “Wait!” she hissed at the doctor. Then she called aloud over her helmet-mounted communicator. “Koll, are we clear?”

  “I guess so, Gunny,” the Marine answered. “I don’t think Decker got the bad guy. There’s no body and no blood. But we have three of those big steel spikes here. Looks like one of those mutant things was getting ready to take a couple shots at us. I guess he got spooked off.”

  “All right, you and Scarpetti stay there. Keep a watch on our flank,” Frost said. “Uschak, Mossier, move up to the ship. Lim, Martinez, stay put and keep us covered.”

  When the Marines from the First Section joined them at the wreck, Frost called to Taggart.

  “Boss, we’re ready to go in. Are we clear?”

  “Yes, Gunny, you’re clear. Go ahead in.”

  “Right,” she answered. “Mossier, you’re first, then Uschak, Harris, and deSilva. Lieutenant, you folks stay here.”

  Anticipating a protest from Cortez, Frost sharpened her tone. “No arguments this time, Doctor. You and your people stay out here until we have a chance to look over the ship. If things go sour on us, we can’t worry about wet-nursing a couple of noncombatants when we should be defending ourselves. If you don’t like that, go back up to the command post and argue it with the captain.”

  Cortez glanced anxiously toward the open hatch. Then, looking resigned, she nodded.

  “Don’t worry about it. You’re going to be safer here than you would be in there with us,” Frost said gently. “If we come across any survivors, we’ll give a yell, and you can come in a-runnin’.”

  At Frost’s gestured command, PFC Mossier squatted to peek into the inky darkness of the cargo bay. He took a quick look, then darted through the hatchway, moving quickly to his left as he entered the bay. The rest of the Marines followed quickly. The last to enter was Gunny Frost, with Cortez and the medics on her heels. A chorus of “clears” echoed muddily in the large bay.

  “Lion Six, this is Three. We’re in. The cargo bay is clear. I’m gonna send Mossier and Uschak to engineering. Harris, deSilva and I will take for’ard.”

  “Six copies. Be careful, Gunny,” Taggart answered.

  “As always, sir,” Frost said matter-of-factly.

  “Gunny, I’m not getting much on the starlight here,” Mossier said. “Must not be getting enough ambient light from outside. Suggest we go to visible light?”

  Frost looked around the cavernous bay and nodded. “Yeah. Starlights off. Entry team, go to visible light.”

  In a few seconds, five beams of light speared the darkness of the hold. Frost panned her light around a bit, examining the twisted bulkheads and buckled deck of the cargo bay. The hold’s aftersection looked like it had suffered fire damage. The thick rubber padding that overlay the bay’s deck had been melted into finger-thick blobs of black crusty matter. Soot streaked the overhead. Yellow-white dry chemicals from the automatic firefighting system dusted the bulkheads and deck.

  As she examined the ruined cargo bay, Gunny Frost noticed that many of the systems that seemed to have survived the crash had been removed from their mounting brackets. Such measures would make sense, had a salvage team reached the wreck, but the Marine rescue team was the first Union force on the scene.

  “All right, Marines, let’s do our jobs,” Frost said, putting the anomaly out of her mind.

  With Jorge deSilva leading the way, Frost’s team moved out of the cargo bay and into the crew section of the vessel. Along the way, the Marines noticed that many of the vessel’s components, vital or not, had been removed. In several places, the systems seemed to have been ripped from their mounting brackets.

  Cabot’s interior was dark and cold. The Marines’ flashlights seemed to deepen rather than relieve the gloom of the interior. Frost motioned her team to a halt while she quickly checked the deck plan on her palm-top data unit.

  “About three meters along, there should be a ladder,” she said, pointing her light down the companionway. “Up one deck, then for’ard again, and we should be in the crew’s quarters.”

  The ladder was precisely where Frost said it should be. DeSilva slowly and stiffly climbed the steel rungs. Something ancient must survive in the human mind, a primal fear left over from the days when mankind feared the demons that lurked in the dark, just beyond the light of their fires. That same anxiety, fed on centuries of horror stories about ghost ships and haunted wrecks, was at work in Jorge deSilva’s mind. At the same time, Gunny Frost, who did not believe in the spirits that inhabited her ancestors’ folk tales felt some of that same apprehension. But her apprehension had a legitimate source. Someone or something had twice attacked the rescue party, and that same someone or something might well be lurking in the deep shadows aboard Cabot.

  The hatch at the top of the ladder was open, the hatch cover standing against its retaining latch. Letting his Pitbull hang from its assault sling, the young Mexican PFC reached up and tugged sharply on the heavy steel cover. The latch held. DeSilva left his rifle where it was, instead drawing his Pug autopistol. Cautiously, he poked his head over the hatch coaming, then rolled quickly off the ladder. Frost heard his heavy boots thudding on the deck above.

  “We’re clear, Gunny,” he called in a tight voice.

  “Calm down, deSilva,” Frost growled, exercising her will to master her own uneasiness. “I’m coming up, and I don’t want you to blow my head off the second it clears the coaming.”

  On Cabot’s upper deck, cables hung in disarray from torn overhead conduits. The steel decking was twisted. Litter and debris were everywhere. Frost aimed her light first aft, then forward. Nothing reacted to the beam’s illumination.

  “Right, let’s go,” she said, gesturing to deSilva.

  The Marine took three steps and froze in place.

  “Gunny, I think we’ve got a survivor.”

  Frost reached his side in less than a second. DeSilva was pointing to a series of red, yellow, and green indicator lights set into a heavy steel frame against the starboard bulkhead. They indicated a life pod. Frost checked the pod’s function monitors. Its life-support systems had been turned down to their minimum operating settings. A ribbon gauge showed that the capsule had less than an hour’s worth of breathable air left in its reserve tanks.

  “Harris, go back and get the docs, double time,” Frost barked. “Tell them we got at least one survivor.”

  “Yes, Gunny.” Harris slid down the ladder and disappeared.

  “DeSilva, check the other pods. See if anybody else is alive.”

  “Right, Gunny.” The young Marine’s fear had evaporated with the need for action.

  Frost put her ear to the life pod door and listened. No sound penetrated the thick metal. Pulling her Ka-Bar combat knife, she hammered on the door with the steel pommel cap, shouting at the top of her voice.

  “Hello! We’re Union Marines. We’re here to rescue you! Hello!”

  No response.

  “Gunny, all the other pods are wrecked,” deSilva said, returning from his assigned task. “Every one of them. If anyone’s left alive, they’re in there.”

  Frost nodded grimly and activated her communicator.

  “Mossier, Uschak, any sign of life at your end?”

  “Not a lick, Gunny,” Mossier replied. Interference from Cabot’s superstructure crackled across the transmission. “We’re in the engine room, or what’s left of it. Whatever brought this ship down was big. I doubt any of the ‘black-gang’ survived.”

  “All right,” Frost said. “Continue your sweep. Let me know if you find anything. Corporal Lim, any signs of life outside?”

  “Negative, Gunny. Everything’s quiet.”

  “Copy. Six, this is Three,” she called to Taggart. “Whatever happened here, it looks like we missed it, sir. Dr. Cortez is working on an escape pod that may contain survivors.”

  “Okay, Gunny. Keep your people on their toes.” Taggart hesitated for a moment. “We’ll call the area secure, though that doesn’t mean anyone can r
elax. I’m moving the rest of the platoon down to the wreck.”

  19

  * * *

  “H arris, you stay here with the docs,” Frost said as she switched her communicator to standby. “DeSilva, you’re with me.

  “Listen, Doc,” the gunnery sergeant said, laying a hand on Cortez’s shoulder. “Just ’cause we’re calling the area secure don’t necessarily make it so. Don’t let your people stray until we’ve had a real good chance to check it out. I’m going to look at the flight deck. We’ll be just up this companionway. Anything goes wrong, give a yell and beat it for’ard. Don’t take any chances, okay?”

  “All right, Sergeant,” Cortez said. “We’ll be fine.”

  “Uh-huh,” Frost’s voice carried a half-skeptical tone. “All right, deSilva, let’s move.”

  As Frost and deSilva picked their way along the companionway toward Cabot’s bridge, Dr. Lieutenant Cortez set her heavy medical packs on the twisted deck and began to examine the heavy steel door of the escape pod.

  Basically a small spacecraft, the pod was about three meters by one and a half and was designed to keep six people alive, if not especially comfortable, for about a week in space. Sometimes called lifeboats, the pods were equipped with a basic navigation computer and rudimentary engines that would allow them to be steered. The units were also fitted with reentry gear, giving the pod a good chance of safely entering a planetary atmosphere on autopilot.

  The entrance to the pod was actually a double door. Not quite an airlock, the inner door sealed the pod itself, while the outer closed tightly to prevent the loss of atmosphere once the pod was launched. Cortez looked up and saw that the massive outer door was still in its retracted position. She knew those doors were held open by explosive bolts that could be closed in less than a second. Once shut, there was no way of reopening the outer doors short of cutting them with a laser torch or blasting them off their tracks.

  Several gauges and displays were mounted next to the thick hatch. These were intended to keep track of the pod’s state of readiness for an emergency. The gauge monitoring the pod’s oxygen reserve barely registered.

  Cortez pulled a folding multitool from her combat harness. Selecting a bit, she quickly unscrewed the monitor panel’s faceplate. Behind the twenty-centimeter square of steel and gauges, there were a number of receptacles, each with the numerous holes of a computer tie-in. From her pack, the doctor extracted a diagnostic unit. For a few seconds she fiddled with the device, running a self-test program to ensure that the gadget was functioning properly. She extracted a couple of leads, each tipped with a multi-pin plug, which she thrust into the proper jacks.

  “Doc, I thought you were in a hurry,” PFC Harris said anxiously.

  “I am, Marine,” Cortez replied absently. “But I’m not in so much of a hurry that I’m going to circumvent procedures. We don’t know how many people might be alive in there. And I’m afraid that, given the low level of the oxygen, some people in there didn’t survive. I want to make sure that the pod is functioning properly before we open it.”

  She broke off as the diagnostic unit squawked, and looked intently at the device. The apparatus confirmed what the pod’s monitors told her. There was almost no breathable air left in the lifeboat. The temperature inside the pod was twenty-seven degrees Celsius, with seventy-eight percent humidity. The device also showed pollutants in the air, none of which was life-threatening in the low concentrations present in the pod.

  Cortez hit the machine’s reset button and keyed in more commands.

  “I also want to make sure that there is no viral, bacteriological, chemical or radiological contamination of the pod’s interior before we open it up.”

  The diagnostic system beeped again. Its indicators showed the pod to be uncontaminated.

  “Okay, let’s get ready to crack it,” Cortez said, rapidly unhooking and stowing the device. She turned to one of her medics. “Fritz, break out those extra respirators. A healthy person could take this atmosphere for a few seconds with no worse effect than burning eyes and respiratory irritation, but if there’s anybody alive in there and not wearing an environment suit, their systems are going to be compromised enough as it is. We don’t need to add poisoning to the mix.”

  Fritz, the medic, extracted a number of plastic-wrapped packages from his pack. Each package contained one fresh and fully charged emergency respirator. If the occupants of the pod were alive and not wearing environment suits, slapping one of the breathing devices over their nose and mouth as soon as the door was opened might spell the difference between survival and death from atmospheric poisoning. He passed two to Cortez, who handed them to the Marine guard.

  “These things are easy to use,” she said, taking another pair from Fritz. “You tear open the package, twist the green knob clockwise until you hear the hiss, and then put it over the victim’s face. There are five straps. They’ll look kind of like an octopus attached to the mask. All you have to do is grab the center of the strap assembly and pull it back over the victim’s head. Make sure you pull the straps up tight so that the mask seals. Got it?”

  Harris looked at the mask and nodded.

  “As soon as the door opens, we rush the pod and get the masks on as many victims as possible. Understand?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “All right, then. It’s showtime.”

  Cortez pulled back a red-and-white-striped cover printed with the word RESCUE and pulled the lever inside.

  Nothing happened.

  Cortez stared at the lever, then at the unresponsive door. She rammed the lever back into its starting position and yanked again. The pod door remained shut.

  Cursing in Spanish, Cortez worked the lever again, this time so violently that she bent the heavy plastic handle.

  Harris stepped forward, passing his masks back to Fritz. He gently slid the frustrated Navy doctor out of his way. For several seconds, he looked over the controls, then stepped back with a disbelieving shake of his head.

  “I think they disabled the controls from the inside,” he said. “I guess they were more afraid of something out here than they were of not being rescued.”

  “Dammit, we have got to get this pod open,” Cortez snarled. She stepped up to the sealed hatch and repeatedly kicked the heavy steel door.

  “Hello! In the pod! We’re here to rescue you. Open the door. I’m a doctor. Let me in.”

  “Take it easy, Doc. That ain’t gonna help,” the Marine said, laying his hands on her shoulders.

  Cortez whirled about, glaring up at the young man, who was half a head taller than she, as though she would like to cut his heart out.

  “Okay, Doc, you’ve got your Pug, you should be safe ’til I get back. Just keep your eyes open,” Harris said. “I’m gonna go aft and see if there is anything in engineering we can use to get this door open.”

  Harris smiled encouragingly and turned away, advising Gunnery Sergeant Frost of his intentions through his communicator.

  As Harris vanished down the companionway, Cortez unlimbered her multitool again, she opened another access panel and studied the wires within. Selecting a pair, she cut and stripped the leads, and twisted them together. Again, she tried the “rescue” handle, but to no avail. The door remained sealed.

  With an angry, frustrated cry, she threw the multitool to the deck and resumed her physical assault on the door. “Goddammit, open up. We’re doctors. We’re here to help you.”

  Fritz and his partner tried to calm their team leader, but she shook off their hands. Rebecca Cortez had become a doctor because she had seen too many people die for lack of help. Her whole career, both as a civilian and as a naval officer, had been dedicated to saving lives. Now, because of a few centimeters of steel, she was unable to help the stricken and dying people in the escape pod.

  Giving the door a final, frustrated kick, Cortez slumped forward, resting her head against the steel bulkhead.

  “Hurry up, Marine,” she said in a hushed, almost-prayerful ton
e. “They aren’t going to last much longer.”

  Then she heard a sharp, flat scuff.

  Forgetting all about the hatch, Cortez grabbed for her sidearm. Though lightweight, the weapon felt clumsy as she pointed the pistol down the deeply shadowed companionway. Her right thumb groped for the weapon’s safety.

  The soft rutching noise repeated itself. She pressed the catch down, readying the big pistol for firing. Taking a deep breath, Cortez brought the Pug up, struggling to hold the weapon still in two trembling hands.

  “Take it easy, Doctor. It’s me,” a familiar baritone voice called out of the gloom.

  Cortez let out a deep shuddering breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and lowered the pistol. Captain Taggart and two of his men stepped into the circle of light cast by the medics’ flashlights. Right behind them was PFC Harris, lugging a portable laser cutter.

  Swiftly the young Marine readied the powerful torch, while Captain Taggart called up a schematic of Cabot’s escape pods on his palm-top. Using an alcohol marker, he drew a rough circle on the escape pod’s hull. Cortez and her medics drew back a bit as Harris powered up the cutter and began burning his way through the tough steel.

  It took nearly five minutes for Harris to complete his cut. As he shut down the laser torch, he drew his big Ka-Bar combat knife and prized out the slab of hull plating he had just burned away.

  “Ready, Doc?” he asked, as he carefully reached into the rough-edged opening.

  Cortez and her medics snatched up their respirator masks. She nodded.

  Harris tugged sharply on something, eliciting a loud thunk from the pod’s door. The heavy panel slid partway open, just enough for Dr. Cortez to rush inside.

  Dimly, her mind noted the chaos and litter inside the lifeboat. Her attention was focused solely on the prostrate figure lying face-up on the deck.

  Dropping to her knees beside the crewman, she ripped the plastic cover from an emergency respirator and strapped it to his face. Only when she was satisfied that the mask was in place and working properly did she look at the patient. He was unconscious, but breathing on his own. Laying two fingers beside the man’s larynx, she felt a good carotid pulse. Though both were good signs, it was impossible to say whether they’d reached him in time.