Operation Sierra-75

by Thomas S. Gressman

  The patient was a young, slight man with dark hair, wearing a Union Space Agency uniform. The nametape sewn to the right breast of his uniform read M ICHELLI . This was Cabot’s third officer, the man who had sent the distress call.

  Cortez glanced about the escape pod and realized that Ensign Michelli had been alone, the sole survivor of a crew of twelve.

  20

  * * *

  C aptain Taggart leaned into the escape pod in an effort to get a look at the interior of the small vessel while trying to keep out of the medical team’s way. He half-expected to see other members of the crew, or at least their lifeless bodies. The sight that met his eyes made him thankful for the closed helmet and respirator of his combat environment suit.

  The interior of the escape pod was in a shambles. Survival packs had been piled in every available space. Most of the fluorescent orange rucksacks had been emptied of their contents. A mylar emergency sleeping bag was tossed casually in one corner. The Marine officer could see a long tear in the bag’s thin reflectorized fabric. Propped against the bulkhead next to the hatch was a lightweight over-and-under survival gun. Taggart picked up the weapon and hinged open the break-action breach. Both the upper rifle barrel and the lower shotgun tube were empty; so was the compartment in the stock where extra ammunition was normally stored. Taggart had a good idea what Michelli had been shooting at before he sealed himself in the pod. The six rifle and eight shotgun cartridges normally provided for the survival gun would not have allowed the shipwrecked ensign to fight off a serious attack. More likely Michelli had used up the survival gun’s limited store of ammunition keeping the enemy at bay while he gathered supplies and sealed himself in the pod.

  Used food and water containers littered the rubber-covered steel decking. Oxygen canisters, both the large standard bottles that normally supplied a life pod with breathable air and the smaller emergency size bottles, were roughly stacked against one bulkhead. Judging from the lone survivor’s condition, and the pod’s monitoring systems, all of those canisters had long since been emptied of their life-giving contents. A dirty environment suit was draped across the top of the canisters. From his vantage point at the pod door, Taggart could see the indicator on the suit’s life-support pack. The gauge that measured the level of life-giving oxygen in the suit’s reserves indicated that the store of breathable air had been exhausted.

  In one back corner partially hidden from view by a blanket duct-taped to the bulkheads was a covered twenty-liter container. Streaky discolorations along the white plastic bucket’s sides and rim told Taggart that Ensign Michelli had been using the container as a makeshift latrine.

  Opposite the screened-off privy was an untidy pile of blankets, next to an inexpensive videodisk player. The battered entertainment unit and a pile of dog-eared paperbound books seemed to have been Michelli’s only means of hanging on to his sanity during his long, self-imposed solitary confinement.

  Appalled at the conditions in which the young ensign had been living for the three weeks between crash and rescue, Taggart turned his attention to the doctors struggling to save the survivor’s life.

  “How’s he doing, Doc?”

  “Not good,” Cortez replied coldly. “He’s dehydrated and suffering from borderline malnutrition. So much for those damn survival packs keeping you alive and healthy. He’s also suffering the beginning stages of oxygen deprivation. Right now, he’s comatose, but he’s stable. We’re starting him on a glucose IV. That ought to get him hydrated, and take care of some of the malnutrition. We can handle the oxygen deprivation easily enough by stuffing him in a pressure shelter.”

  “How long until he regains consciousness?”

  Cortez glared at him, then turned to her assistant. “Stay with him, George. I’ll be right back.” Then, motioning for Taggart to follow, she slipped out of the pod.

  “I didn’t want to say this in front of Michelli. We know a patient in his condition can hear what’s being said. We just don’t know how much they comprehend. He could wake up in an hour, tomorrow, or never. I just don’t know. If he does wake up, I don’t know what kind of condition he’s going to be in. He’s suffering from oxygen deprivation. That means there might be brain damage.” Cortez paused as though unsure what to say next. “And you, Captain, may be partly to blame for this.”

  Taggart looked at the doctor in stunned surprise.

  “That’s right. You might be responsible for that young man’s condition, at least in part.” Cortez spat the words at him. “He had the pod’s life support system turned down to its minimum operating settings. If he hadn’t, I doubt that he’d be alive right now. Even so, he wasn’t going to last but a few more hours. If you hadn’t been so gung ho on doing things ‘the Marine way,’ we might have gotten here yesterday, or even the day before that. That might not have made much of a difference in the dehydration, or malnutrition, but he certainly wouldn’t have run out of oxygen to the point of risking brain damage.”

  For a long while, Taggart stared at Dr. Cortez, unsure how to respond to her accusations. Was she overreacting? He had moved the rescue team along as rapidly as he deemed safe, but could he have hurried them more? Had he taken too many precautions, or spent too much time chasing down the mysterious creatures that seemed bent on harrying his small command?

  The communicator built into his helmet buzzed sharply, cutting off that line of self-questioning thought. He switched the unit from standby to active.

  “This is Lion Six, go ahead.”

  “Six, this is Three,” Onawa Frost’s husky contralto said in his ear. “We’ve finished our sweep of the ship. It’s clear. But we’ve found something you might want to look at.”

  “What is it, Gunny? Survivors?”

  “Sir, you need to see this for yourself.” There was an odd note in Frost’s normally steady voice, an undertone of revulsion mixed with anger and fear.

  “Right. Where are you?”

  “About a hundred meters northeast of the ship.”

  “Very well, I’m on my way,” Taggart said, grateful for a reason to leave Dr. Cortez’s accusing presence.

  When Taggart stepped out of the survey vessel’s sprung cargo bay door, he could see Gunnery Sergeant Frost and a small handful of Marines standing on the rim of a shallow gully near the ship. As he made his way across the valley floor toward them, Taggart passed through the debris field that Frost had remarked upon earlier. Taggart noticed that almost all of the debris had come from interior sections of the ship, and none of it seemed to have suffered the kind of damage one would have expected to see had the items been forcibly ejected from the ship. In fact, many of the objects seemed to be components that had been unbolted from their mountings and then simply dropped outside the vessel. The variety of items among the debris field was quite wide. A few meters from Cabot’s open cargo bay door, he came across a portable magnetic anomaly detector. A bit farther on, a small plastic case, such as might hold soil samples, lay on a gray-painted steel junction box. The junction box had not been carefully unbolted from its brackets. Short sections of conduit, torn, ragged wires trailing from their twisted and broken ends, were still attached to the hand-sized metal octagon. It seemed to Taggart that all of the items had been removed from the ship, carried a short distance away, and then dropped. There was no sense or reason in the kind or number of objects littering the valley floor.

  A few meters short of where Frost awaited him a large black-plastic object caught his attention. A coffeemaker stood upright on the ground, its glass carafe nowhere to be seen. Something odd, beyond the setting in which one would not normally expect to find a coffeemaker, caught Taggart’s attention. He knelt next to the appliance and examined it as closely as he could without actually touching the device. A thin shiny layer of dark purple-black material coated the back of the machine. Taggart freed his Ka-Bar from its sheath and lightly probed the foreign substance. The stuff proved be as fragile as spun sugar, flaking away as soon as the knife’s hard steel point touched
it. Beneath the strange matter, the appliance’s housing was shiny and clean. Something about the debris field and the defaced coffeemaker caused an involuntary shudder of disgust along his spine.

  Taggart got to his feet, slipping the knife back into its upside-down sheath on his left shoulder. As he crossed the final few meters between him and Frost, he read tension and anger in his normally impassive gunnery sergeant’s stance.

  “So what is it, Gunny?” he asked quietly.

  Frost didn’t answer, but gestured sharply at the bottom of the gully. There, in a careless heap, lay a number of human corpses, all clad in the green uniform of the Union Space Corps. A few of his men had climbed down into the gully and were checking the bodies.

  Taggart slid rapidly down the uneven slope to the gully floor. He counted six corpses in that narrow defile. All seemed to have been dead before they were tossed into the gully. Though he was no doctor, Captain Taggart had seen enough dead men in his career to know that none of the crewmen had died easily. Many bore the signs of having died in the crash. One, whose collar flashes indicated that he had been Cabot’s executive officer, had died of a broken neck. The corpse’s head had been twisted at a 180-degree angle to its body. Another, who had once been an attractive young woman, had the cyanotic complexion of someone who had died of asphyxiation. Strangely, her eyelids and lips were puffy and red. None of the bodies seemed to have been abused in any way, though every scrap of metal seemed to have been removed from the corpses. Rings, watches, rank insignia, even belt buckles had been removed.

  That last stirred something in Taggart’s memory.

  “Gunny Frost, turn the recovery operation over to Corporal Henry,” he barked. “Tell him to get this all down on tape. I want to document every damn thing about this frigging mission. I want as complete an account as you can give me of where each body was found and what condition they were in when you found them.

  “Then, get hold of Dade and Black. Tell them to meet us back at the wreck.”

  “Okay,” Frost answered. “What is it, boss?”

  Taggart did not reply but climbed back up the side of the gully. Just short of the rim, he stopped and picked up a small metallic object he saw gleaming in the dirt. Gently he wiped away a bit of mud clinging to the thing. It was a gold Star of David. Turning the bauble over in his fingers, he discovered that it, too, was stained with the odd purple-black substance. But unlike the dry crust on the coffee machine, the stuff coating the back of the six-pointed star was moist and sticky, almost the consistency of half-dried blood.

  With a snort of disgust, Taggart wiped both the pendant and his hands clean on the blue-green weeds growing near the lip of the ravine. He shoved the Star into a breast pocket on his environment suit and stalked off toward the ship, with Gunny Frost following close behind him.

  “Sir, what is this all about?” Frost asked as they reached Cabot. Taggart did not answer, but paced angrily across the gloomy cargo bay. He pulled the Star of David out of his pocket and worried the bauble between his gloved fingers. Why the defiled religious symbol was such a source of anger for him, a backslid Catholic, was a mystery to Maxwell Taggart. It wasn’t the fact that the corpses had been looted. He had seen despoiled bodies before. Neo-Soviet troops, especially those in the Rad battalions, were given to stripping the dead, regardless of whose side they were on, of any and all useful or valuable gear. No, this was something different. The corpses tossed so callously into the gully still wore their boots and uniforms. Those two items were usually taken first. Here, the bodies had been plundered of relatively useless accoutrements, like the blackened bronze rank insignia, but clothing and boots were left untouched.

  “Captain, what’s eating you?” Frost pressed him.

  Taggart stopped pacing and shot her a black look, then resumed his measured strides across the cargo bay.

  He’d only completed two more laps when Rick Dade stepped inside the empty hold.

  “Boss, this is weird. We can’t find any trace of the rest of the crew.”

  “What do you mean, the rest of the crew?” Frost asked.

  “I mean the rest of the crew, Gunny. The briefing said there were twelve people aboard Cabot, right? Well, we’ve got six dead in the gully, and one survivor. That leaves five unaccounted for.”

  “Very well, Corporal,” Taggart snapped. The captain surprised himself with the curt tone in his voice, but was unable to moderate it. “Give me the recording you made yesterday when those things attacked you.”

  Dade glanced at Gunny Frost as he reached into his buttpack to extract the recording. Taggart shoved the disk into his data reader, glaring at the small screen. Images of the previous day’s engagement flickered and jumped across the screen. As the recording ran out, he grunted disgustedly.

  Taggart handed the unit to Onawa Frost, saying, “Tell me what you see.”

  Frost played the image file, studying the display carefully. Suddenly she caught her breath, stopped, rewound and restarted the recording, punching pause only a few seconds later.

  “That’s right, Gunny,” Taggart said, as she passed the data unit back to him. “One of those goddam things had a Union Space Force belt buckle implanted in its shoulder, like some kind of frigging trophy. The Sovs aren’t exactly given to decorating their mutants, are they?”

  “Not that I can remember, sir.”

  “Gunny, I don’t know as how we’re dealing with mutants here. At least, not mutants created by the Neo-Sovs. I wonder if we’ve encountered a new alien race, one that is demonstrably hostile, and bloody dangerous.”

  21

  * * *

  “C orporal Henry,” Taggart called through his communicator.

  “Right here, boss.”

  “I want those bodies bagged up for recovery,” Taggart instructed. “It’s going to be a gruesome job, but we aren’t going to leave anyone behind for those bloody grave robbers. And make sure you document everything you see, and I do mean everything, Corporal, is that clear? I’m still not sure what we’re dealing with here. I’m starting to think it’s a first-contact situation, I want to give the boys in I-Corps every bit of data we can.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Good. Then get to it,” Taggart said. “And Corporal, tell your men to keep their eyes open. The critters that did this may come back.”

  Taggart closed the connection and turned to his scouts.

  “Dade, you and Black start looking for the bridge voice and data recorders. I want to know what the hell happened to this ship. If you run into any more of those things . . .”

  “I know, sir, be careful.”

  “No, Corporal,” Taggart snapped. “If you run into any more of those things, I want you to blow ’em to hell.”

  “Semper fi,” Dade said, and slipped back out of the cargo bay.

  “Onawa, you’re with me. I want to have a closer look at this ship. We’ll start with the bridge.”

  The platoon leaders headed forward. Instead of merely retracing Frost’s steps, they stuck to the vessel’s lower deck. The companionway leading forward out of the cargo bay was a shambles. Every square meter of bulkhead space was a ruin of snarled and torn wires, bent metal, and charred plastics. Taggart was struck again by the randomness of the destruction. In one place the thieves had ripped away long sections of conduit, yet in an avionics bay only a few meters along the corridor, the ground-scan radar systems were virtually untouched. An atmospheric testing lab was completely gutted. The aliens, as Taggart was now calling the ugly, misshapen humanoids, had even ripped up the thick rubber pads covering the deck. The next compartment along the corridor, a storage locker for soil and water samples, had been ignored.

  Most of the components and instruments had been unbolted, or cut away, apparently with laser torches. One such instrument, its power cells depleted, lay discarded on the deck. Taggart noted that the pistol-shaped tool’s grip and part of its housing were coated with the flaky purple-black crust that he had come to think of as dried blood. Other
systems seemed to have been ripped out, as the jagged, twisted remains of mounting brackets would suggest.

  Reaching the forward end of the corridor, Taggart and Frost mounted a ladder and reached Cabot’s upper deck just aft of the flight deck.

  The survey ship’s bridge was a mess. Nearly every control and panel on the flight deck was smashed. The small, thick, heat-resistant windscreens were nearly opaque because of spiderweb cracks. The steel deck plating was buckled in accordion-like folds just forward of the hatchway leading onto the bridge. Bolts, rivets, and welds had given way under the stress of the vessel’s slamming into the floor of the rift valley. One could see through the gap produced by that cave-in to the corridor below. Both the pilot’s and flight engineer’s acceleration couches had been torn from their moorings and were thickly smeared with the dark reddish brown stains of human blood. Beneath the engineer’s console, Taggart caught a glimpse of what might have been an empty boot, but was not. The large coppery smudge on the deck bore witness to that.

  Taggart shook his head silently, feeling a deep and genuine sorrow for the men who had died on Cabot’s bridge. In his mind’s eye, he could see them struggling to keep the big survey ship under control as she plunged toward the rocky surface of the valley floor, too busy fighting to save both ship and shipmates to be afraid for their own lives. Though there was often an interservice rivalry between Ground and Space Forces that stretched back to the time when Marines and blue-water sailors played out the usually good-natured antagonism between their respective military branches, this was no way for two good men to die.

  “Let’s go, Gunny, We still have the upper decks to look over.”

  “Sir, what is it you’re looking for?” Frost asked, a frown creasing her forehead.