Operation Sierra-75

by Thomas S. Gressman

  For a long while, Michelli did not answer. He lay back on his bunk, his face twisted. Tears leaked from the corners of his tightly shut eyes. His chest heaved as he gasped for breath. For a moment Cortez feared he was having a heart attack. When he spoke again, it was in a voice thick with grief and self-condemnation.

  “The truth is, I panicked when the engines blew. I ran right for the escape pod and sealed myself in. I tried to launch the pod, but it wouldn’t drop. The explosion must have warped part of the ship’s superstructure.

  “Everybody else was at their stations when we hit. The whole flight crew was on the bridge. They were all killed instantly. Captain Hu was almost cut in half. I had to take her out of there in two different body bags.” Michelli’s voice had become a tortured sob. “Lieutenant McBride didn’t have a mark on him, but he was just as dead as the captain. Everybody else was either killed by the crash or badly injured. After the crash, I tried to help the survivors, but I’m not a doctor. All I could do was keep them doped up so they didn’t suffer too bad.

  “Hayes had lost both legs. Piper was pretty badly burned, third degree, over most of his body. I couldn’t do anything for them, Captain. I gave them morphine, a lot of it. I couldn’t let them suffer.”

  “It’s okay, boy,” Taggart said, laying a hand on Michelli’s arm through the plastic of the pressure tent. He looked at Cortez, who shook her head.

  “No, let him talk it out,” she said. She could feel the anguish the young ensign must have lived with every day since the crash. “The sooner he gets all this out of his system, the better.”

  Taggart nodded grimly and, after giving Michelli a moment to compose himself, asked him to continue.

  “Well, sir,” Michelli said, sniffing and wiping his eyes with his fingers, “the central section of the ship was pretty much intact, or at least it was holding pressure. I did what I could with what I knew, and what I could scrounge out of the hard-copy manuals. I rigged up the ship’s auxiliary power cells to run the emergency communication system in the life pod. I was almost finished when those things came.

  “I managed to drag Krinock and Bogi inside the pod before the monsters found us. I had to seal up the pod or they’d have gotten us too. They slaughtered everybody left outside. For hours, those creatures crawled all over the ship, looting her. They gutted her, sir. They smashed up systems, ripped out components, and stole everything they could carry away. When they finally left, it took me a couple of hours to get up the nerve to open the hatch again. I went outside to see if anyone was left alive. There wasn’t. The creatures had killed them all and dumped them in a ravine out there.” Michelli gestured vaguely toward the ship’s hull and the rift valley beyond.

  “We know Walter,” Cortez said gently. “We found them. We’ll take them home for proper burial.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Michelli’s voice was a bit stronger, the emotion having spent itself in a cathartic rush.

  “So what happened to the other two, Krinock and Bogi?” Taggart asked.

  “Phil Bogi died the next day, and Tom Krinock a few days later. They were just hurt too bad. I couldn’t help them,” Michelli said in a hollow tone. “I carried them outside the ship. I wanted to bury them, so that the monsters would leave them alone, but I couldn’t. I was so afraid those things were coming back. All I could do was leave them in the ravine with the rest of the crew. Then I came back here. I dragged in all the supplies I could find and sent off that call for help. There was barely enough power in the batteries for that one shot. Then I sealed myself in and sat down to wait. It wasn’t an hour later that they came back. And they kept coming back, every day, just about nightfall. They tried a couple of times to break into the pod, but I guess the lock stumped them. Honestly, I didn’t think I was going to make it.”

  Michelli stopped and leaned back against the bunk. For several seconds he looked steadily from Taggart to Frost to Cortez. His face and eyes were as empty as a doll’s. Then a sudden look of realization flashed across his face.

  “Captain, there were a couple people outside the ship when those things came,” Michelli said, pushing himself into a sitting position. “I couldn’t find their bodies. I think the creatures might have taken them prisoner.”

  24

  * * *

  W ord that Michelli had regained consciousness spread quickly among the men and women of the rescue team. The shipwrecked ensign’s fears concerning his possibly abducted crewmates spread with equal rapidity. Marine and medic alike expressed the same thought: “We’ve got to go find them, dead or alive. We don’t leave our people behind.”

  But there were a few Marines for whom the possibility of a rescue mission within the larger rescue mission held a distant second to the task immediately to hand. Those men were the sentries Taggart had deployed around the perimeter of the wreck site. As Taggart and Frost stood in the corridor outside the makeshift sick bay, Private deSilva scrambled up the ladder from Cabot’s lower deck.

  “Captain, Corporal Henry sent me to fetch you and Gunny Frost, sir. Something’s going on outside.”

  Taggart and Frost ran for the ladder. As he waited for his subordinates to descend the steel rungs, Taggart shouted to Cortez.

  “Remember, Doctor, tell your people to keep to the upper deck. If you need us, use the communicators and we’ll come a-runnin’.”

  Not waiting for the doctor’s reply, Taggart dropped swiftly out of sight, following his troops down the ladder.

  “What’s going on, Corporal?” Taggart asked as he strode into the cargo bay.

  “Don’t rightly know, boss,” came the reply. “We’ve been hearing kinda funny noises off and on all night. At first I thought it was loose rock sliding off those big white piles all over the valley. It doesn’t really sound right, though. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

  “Did you send out a patrol?”

  “Well, sort of, sir,” Henry said. “I took one out myself. We poked around for an hour or so and didn’t find anything. It’s as black as hell’s heart out there, sir. If I had to make a guess, Captain, I’d say it was just what we thought it was, rock sliding down a hillside.”

  “But we can’t assume that,” Frost said in a level voice. “It could be the Mashers, trying to draw us away from the ship.”

  “Hmm.” Taggart pursed his lips and thought a bit. “I think you may be right, Gunny. All right, I’d rather not risk any men in the dark. Double the guard. I don’t want to go chasing sounds in the night. We know there are hostiles out there; we just don’t know anything about them. Could be this is the aliens’ way of trying to draw some of us away from the ship.”

  Taggart turned away from the chorus of “aye, ayes” and headed toward the corner of the cargo bay he had staked out for his own bunk roll. As he wearily lowered himself to the steel decking, his mind was full of the concerns of the past and coming days. Thus far the operation had been relatively easy. Losing PFC Kowalski and Dr. Ake weighed heavily on his mind. Never mind the Union’s policy of making every effort to recover the bodies of men lost in action, his inability to locate either the men or their remains was a mark of personal failure, at least to his way of thinking.

  At least, with Michelli’s recovery, Dr. Cortez had finally broken her stony silence toward him. And yet the underlying hostility remained. Try as he might Taggart could not quite wrap his mind around the woman’s reasons for disliking him. She claimed she bore him no personal animosity, yet her attitude showed a fierce antipathy. Perhaps Frost’s assessment had been correct. It was a sort of case of reverse discrimination. Many members of the Mexican Contribution Force were discriminated against—there was no denying that. Taggart wondered if Cortez had made up her mind that he was going to be a prejudiced bigot before she learned the truth of his character and had erected a wall of barely concealed hostility as a means of defense.

  Taggart snorted at the idea. He thought briefly over the short time he had known Rebecca Cortez. In that brief period, he had treated her w
ith a certain lack of courtesy. But his attitude had not been birthed out of racism. Pride and tradition ran deep in what had once been the United States Marine Corps, as illustrated by many Marines’ refusal to accept the all-encompassing label of Ground Corps. As a professional soldier, Taggart had a low opinion of officers who were given their rank based solely upon their career choice. In all likelihood, it had been that prideful disdain that Cortez had mistaken for bigotry.

  With a sigh, he pushed the thoughts and emotions out of his mind. He consulted the life-support display on his combat environment suit’s monitoring system. The unit was functioning properly. The current charge had over 150 hours left on it. A well-maintained suit could keep a man alive for nearly two weeks in the field, depending upon his level of activity.

  He lay back on his thin sleeping pad. He could feel the cold of the cargo bay’s steel deck through the foam-rubber pad and sleeping bag. That would not prevent him from catching a few hours’ sleep. His consciousness was drifting away even as he shrugged his body into a more comfortable position.

  * * *

  “Boss, we got trouble.”

  Taggart snapped awake at Gunny Frost’s first shake of his shoulder.

  “What is it?”

  “Three of the sensor packages have gone off-line, including one we cobbled together out of a probe,” Frost replied. “They went black within a few seconds of each other. The operator woke me as soon as it happened. I’ve got all of the boys up and alert. We’re scanning the area with starlight gear, but so far nothin’.”

  “All right. Show me.” Taggart stood up and threw off the dopey feeling that being yanked out of a sound sleep sometimes caused.

  Frost led him across the gloomy cargo bay toward the spot where they had installed the monitoring system for the platoon’s remote ground sensors. As they went, Taggart could see the shadowy forms of his men. Some crouched behind the low barricade of rocks and dirt they had erected as an improvised fighting position before the open bay door. Others were “pinched up” just inside the bay itself, waiting for the enemy to make his presence felt before they swung into action.

  “Here it is, Captain,” the sensor operator, a private first class from Second Squad, said, tapping the liquid crystal display of the monitoring unit. “First to go was a seismic right here. Then we lost a thermal, and then the survey pod. They all blanked out within a minute or so of each other. I tried reestablishing the link, and even rebooting the system, but no dice. They’re out of commission. My guess is somebody knocked them out.”

  “Concur,” Frost said in reply to her captain’s questioning look.

  “Very well.” Taggart made his decision quickly. “Gunny, send a fire team out to check on those sensors. The rest of us will stand ready to jump in if this is anything more than a coincidence, and I think it is.”

  “Right, sir,” Frost said. “I’ll take a fire team from Second Squad, if that’s okay with you, sir.”

  Taggart looked sharply at his senior noncom. While there were no specific regulations barring it, dividing a squad into two smaller fire teams in the face of an enemy was generally looked down upon by both the brass and the soldiers on the line. Assigning the platoon’s senior noncommissioned officer to handle a detached fire team was usually treated with similar disdain. Breaking a squad down into four- or five-man teams diminished the amount of firepower that might be brought to bear on a target, while detaching an officer or senior noncom usually took that leader out of a position from which to more effectively control the actions of the entire squad.

  Still, he had little choice. With only two squads at his disposal, Taggart needed to keep most of his force in position to defend the ship and the noncombatants inside. Gunny Frost would have to take out a five-man fire team.

  As Frost called out the men she wanted, Taggart slipped through the open bay door, settling down behind the stone and earth barricade. From there he would have better control over the situation, if things degenerated into a shooting match.

  * * *

  It took Onawa Frost only a few seconds to assemble the men she wanted. All were experienced fighters, and all were good levelheaded Marines. As she moved her men out of the bay, she caught Captain Taggart’s eye. The captain lifted his hand in a farewell gesture, which Frost returned, feeling none of the good cheer that such a gesture sometimes implied.

  “All right, move out,” she whispered.

  One by one, like faceless ghosts, the men slipped over the breastwork and into the darkness beyond. Frost was the last to go. When her feet touched the soil on the far side of the makeshift parapet, she keyed in her low-light viewing system. The valley floor leapt into a clear, eerie vista of black, gray, and green. Her troopers were spread out ahead of her with three meters between each man. They moved cautiously, taking their time. Occasionally, one would pause and look around, his weapons following his eyes. They listened intently for sounds that might betray the presence of an aggressor. As she watched the slow, careful progress of her fire team, Gunny Frost felt a sense of pride. These men were Marines, no matter what the politicians back on Earth called them.

  Suddenly one of the men stopped. He pointed at the ground a few feet in front of him. The extended index finger, told Frost that he had not seen the enemy, as a fully splayed hand would have indicated, but rather had located one of the crippled sensor packages.

  “Halt,” she whispered into her communicator. She knew there was little chance of the enemy overhearing the hissed command, but old habits die hard, and when they do, they usually kill the one who ignores them. “Hold position.”

  Hefting her shotgun, Frost moved quickly and quietly to join the man who had found the disabled remote. The ground sensor was a dark green metal box, a bit larger than a family-size soup can. Once it had housed delicate seismographic sensors capable of detecting something weighing as little as twenty-five kilos, along with telemetry units that allowed remote monitoring of the device. Given its condition, an old model tracked tank could have rumbled over the sensor’s location and it wouldn’t detect a thing. The unit’s metal housing seemed to have been ripped open with a hacksaw, and the internal components looked like they had been smashed with a hammer.

  Frost clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, breaking static to attract the attention of her men. Using hand gestures she instructed her men to move off on a right oblique heading northward, toward the next out-of-service sensor package. When they found the next device, the thermograph’s casing had been pried open, and the heat-sensing unit torn away.

  Thirty meters further north, the survey probe-cum–ground sensor had also been trashed. The thick steel outer shell had been hacked open and all of the internal electronics ripped from their mountings. After warning her troops to shield their night-vision-equipped eyes, Frost pulled her flashlight out and began to quarter and search the area, hooding the light’s beam with her hand.

  A few meters southeast of the ruined probe, she found a small pool of dark reddish purple fluid. The sticky liquid was beginning to seep into the dusty ground. On the edges of the puddle, a dark purple black flaky material had already begun to form.

  Dammit, she swore under her breath. Then keying open her communicator, she contacted Captain Taggart.

  “Lion Six, this is Lion Three. We found the sensor packages, boss. One is smashed. The others have been ripped open and gutted. I think our ugly little friends have been looting again.”

  Taggart’s reply was lost as a shower of metal spikes tore into the Marines’ position.

  “Cover!” Frost screamed, diving behind the probe. Only three of her men responded. One slumped forward with his belly against a rock outcropping. His head lay at an odd angle to his shoulders. A thick rod of metal jutted out of his neck, just below the right ear. The man had died instantly. A second man lay writhing on the ground, his hands locked around a spike protruding from his left thigh.

  “Corpsman!” a Marine yelled, and scrabbled on his belly to reach his wounde
d comrade.

  “Ortega, will you get the hell down!” Frost shouted.

  The man gave no indication of having heard her. Instead he grabbed his buddy by the shoulder straps of his load-bearing gear and, crawling, dragged him toward the shelter of an outcropping. Three spikes dug into the soft earth not far from Ortega’s struggling body, but none touched either the Marine or the man he was risking his life to save.

  Frost snapped her shotgun up to her shoulder and pulled the trigger. A hollow boom roared out, almost blanketing the lighter cracks of the Pitbull rifles. The fire team’s heaviest weapon, a Bulldog support rifle, lay in the open, where the dead man had dropped it.

  Ortega was still screaming for a corpsman and trying to staunch the flow of blood from his injured comrade’s leg by clamping his hands over the wound. The protruding spike made that difficult, but to pull it from the man’s leg might do more harm than good, and Ortega knew it.

  Frost let go another blast of buckshot from her Jackal. Without a clear target, she knew her chances of hitting anything other than the landscape were thin. But the deafening report and huge muzzle flare of the big eighteen-millimeter weapon would have as much psychological effect as a full-auto burst from a Pitbull.

  As she racked the slide, chambering another round, a second volley of spikes fell on the Marines’ position. Two sharpened steel projectiles struck the probe’s casing. One glanced away in a shower of pale sparks; the other embedded itself in the device’s metal skin. A third slammed into the dead Marine’s chest and pitched him over on his back, arms and legs splayed obscenely. None of the projectiles found a living target.

  With a yell of anger Frost loosed two more blasts of shotgun fire into the night and ducked back into the cover of the probe to reload. As she slammed shells into the loading port in the weapon’s lower receiver, she heard a low, guttural snarl.

  A dozen or so short, brutish figures came bounding out of the darkness toward the Marines. Frost had time for only one shot before the creatures were upon her, but the wide-spreading blast of heavy lead pellets ripped into two of the ugly monsters. They dropped to the ground. She reversed her weapon and smashed its stock into an onrushing creature’s face.