by Rick Partlow
He had to wait until the motion died down again before he threw a leg over the side and followed her, hunting blindly for the footholds set in the side of the hull as he held on to the edge of the hatchway. Even with the lighter gravity here, he didn’t want to put his wounded back through an unassisted drop to the ground. He found the indentations in the hull and lowered himself carefully, ignoring the persistent, annoying flapping sound that was drowning out even the roaring of the wind, and concentrating on his hand and foot placement until he stepped down and his boots sank a couple centimeters into soft, muddy ground.
Past the scorched, blackened metal of the lifepod’s hull, past the furrow its impact had made in the soft, loamy ground, he could see the source of the racket: the obscenely cheerful red and white parachute that had cushioned their descent was stretched out in the direction of the gusting wind, yanking in petulant futility against the cables that secured it to the nose of the capsule. He shuddered at the thought of their lives balanced on a few hundred square meters of nylon cloth, then turned away to look at their surroundings.
They were in the valley he’d seen, he was sure of it; the mountain pass loomed ahead of them, a cut between two jagged masses of white, and from the cut sprang the wedge of brown and green. The brown was the soil, while the green was supplied by thick matts of algal growth that spread out of steaming hot pools fed by underground springs. They dotted the landscape all around the valley, most of them surrounded by huge cones from mineral deposits, and the cones in turn covered with more of the fungus. It coated every rock, floated in every pool of water and somehow he was sure it lived even beneath the snow in the distance.
“What the hell is that stuff anyway?” he asked Fontenot. She’d been scanning their surroundings carefully and she turned back at his question. “That algae or whatever it is. I see it all around the Pirate Worlds and even on Periphery colonies, but I never recall seeing it on any of the Core worlds.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“They didn’t teach you about that shit in your Academy biology classes?” She sounded genuinely surprised.
“We mostly learned about Earth life,” he admitted. “And some stuff about the Core worlds, and how their evolution paralleled ours.”
“People out here who think about such things---and there aren’t too many who have the luxury---call it Predecessor Weed. The scientific types I’ve talked to say it’s common to every habitable planet and moon in the Cluster except Earth and the Tahni home world.” She shrugged. “It’s the reason they’re habitable in the first place. The Predecessors supposedly engineered the stuff and spread it out over every world that might be the right distance from a star to become even halfway habitable someday.”
Ash had heard of the Predecessors, of course; everyone had. They’d been a staple of popular culture ever since the discovery of the carvings on Mars that had pointed human explorer towards the first wormhole jumpgate in the asteroid belt. That gate had led to Hermes, Proxima Centauri’s only habitable planet and Earth’s oldest interstellar colony, and on Hermes they’d found a map carved into the side of the Edge Mountains with the location of every jumpgate in the Cluster. And that had been the only traces that anyone had ever found of the Predecessors, or Ancients. Not one skeleton, not one ruin, not one piece of technology; no one knew where they’d come from, where they’d gone, or what they looked like.
“Every world?” Ash repeated, frowning. “I’ve lived on three different colonies and never seen the shit.”
“On some of them,” she explained, “it got out-competed by the stuff it evolved into. On others, we replaced it with Earth life. But it’s always there.” She cocked an eyebrow. “Why do you think the Predecessor Cult has so many followers?”
He nodded slowly. It was a daunting thought, the idea of some god-like, advanced aliens introducing life across the Cluster hundreds of thousands or even millions of years ago. And they were gone without a trace.
What the hell happened to them?
“We’re at the far end of that valley I saw,” he said, shaking off the wonder and getting his head back into the present. “I think the readings that could have been a fusion reactor are back that way.” He gestured towards the mountain pass, kilometers in the distance. “We should get walking.”
He started to take a step forward, but Fontenot caught his arm in an unyielding metal fist. He looked over in surprise and saw her staring at a point only forty meters away, beside a cone of green-covered calcite.
“What?” he blurted.
“Put your hands behind your head and stand very still,” she advised him, eyes on the near distance, then followed her own advice, interlacing her fingers behind her neck.
It took Ash a moment to understand what was going on, and when he did, realization came with a jolt of fear also tinged with hope. He moved his hands slowly, putting them behind his head, wincing as the motion tugged at the wound on his shoulder blade. His eyes darted back and forth, wondering where whatever she’d seen was.
It took him a long moment to spot them; their camouflage was excellent, and so was their movement discipline. The closest he’d come to ground troops during the war were the Search and Rescue personnel who shared the carrier Implacable with his squadron of missile cutters, but he knew about Recon Marines and he recognized the chameleon camo coating on their armor. They seemed to appear out of the ground, only obvious once they actually moved and separated from the greens and yellows and browns around them.
They rose lithely, one after another like dancers in a ballet, shouldering military Gauss rifles, devastating weapons that fired a tungsten slug the size of a man’s little finger at 2,500 meters per second. One round could put a hole through him the size of a basketball and he endeavored not to move a muscle. Getting shot once in a day was enough.
There were nine of them in all, a full squad if he remembered his Table of Organization and Equipment correctly, and they spread out quickly into a semicircular perimeter, ten meters between them, down on one knee. All except one, who walked up to the two of them, his rifle tucked into the crook of his arm like a big-game hunter of the 19th Century. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and when he reached up and pulled off his helmet, the face regarding them with cool curiosity was right out of a recruiting poster, all square jaw and high cheekbones and piercing dark eyes and hair buzzed down to a shadow on his scalp. The rank stenciled in subdued black chevrons on his right shoulder was that of a Gunnery Sergeant.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked them in a voice that would have sounded at home coming from a baritone opera singer. “And how in the name of God did you wind up in a lifepod from the Metaurus?”
He motioned back to the two men to his right as he spoke and they moved past Ash and Fontenot toward the open hatch of the escape capsule.
“I’m Ash Carpenter, Gunny. Commander Carpenter, Space Fleet,” he added, “retired, kind of. This is Korri Fontenot.”
“Sergeant Major, Commonwealth Marine Corps,” Fontenot put in, her tone a bit pawky, “pretty fucking past retired and nearly into dead.”
“We were…” Ash trailed off, hunting for a word. “We were commissioned by Fleet Intelligence to find out what happened to you and your ship.”
“Why wouldn’t Fleet Intelligence come out here themselves?” the Gunny demanded, not bothering to give them his name.
“Gunny!” One of the Marines the man had sent to check out the pod barked urgently. Ash resisted an urge to look back at him. “There’s a man in here. He’s unconscious.”
“And he’s an asshole,” Fontenot contributed over her shoulder.
“Gunnery Sergeant…” Ash looked at the big man questioningly.
“Kamara,” he supplied, sounding reluctant.
“Gunny Kamara, I know the Captain died on the ship. Who’s the highest ranking survivor?”
“That would be Commander Busick,” Kamara told him. “She was the XO.”
“Maybe we could save some time explaining and re
-explaining,” Ash said, “if you could just take me to her and let me tell her the story.”
Kamara regarded him appraisingly for a long moment before he slowly nodded.
“All right. Ramirez, Jansen, secure their weapons and zip-tie their hands. Giordano, Shan, carry the wounded.” His lip twisted and he sniffed in amusement as he slipped his helmet back on. “Let’s let the officers sort this out.”
Chapter Ten
“No wonder I couldn’t see the settlement from orbit,” Ash said softly, shaking his head.
Gunny Kamara had led them on a five-kilometer hike back towards the mountain pass, a winding journey around thermal springs and geysers and ponds of meltwater and over layers and layers of algae. It hadn’t been a pleasant walk, even in half normal gravity, not wearing vacuum suits and sucking in air that was too thin to be healthy and too near freezing to be comfortable. The Marines carrying Singh hadn’t complained though, so he’d kept his mouth shut.
He’d expected to see buildings, or equipment or vehicles, but there’d been nothing until they’d cleared the hot springs and started walking a trail over and between rolling hills of moss-covered soil and algae-coated rock. That’s when he’d spotted the opening in the hillside. He’d thought it was a cave at first, though he wasn’t certain of how the local geology would have formed one there; but as they walked closer, he’d begun to see that the tunnel was man-made. It was also much larger and farther away than it had looked when he’d spotted it, and it took another five minutes of resolute trudging before they’d reached the buildfoam walls.
They had to be reinforced by some sort of high-strength framework to support the weight of all that dirt and rock over them, he thought. Maybe BiPhase Carbide? But that was expensive, usually reserved for starship hulls and military armor. Transporting heavy, expensive alloy here to some insignificant moon in an isolated system way out at the edge of the Cluster had to have been expensive as all hell and keeping it secret…automated construction equipment? Even more expensive.
“This is some serious shit,” Fontenot commented next to him, voice pitched low, and he nodded by way of reply.
Kamara led them through the tunnel into the darkness, and Ash’s eyes struggled to adapt to it; he felt like the slow child of the bunch, since Fontenot had thermal and infrared filters in her bionic ocular, and the Marines all had night vision lensing in their helmets’ Heads-Up-Displays. He resisted an urge to put a hand to Fontenot’s arm for support; his hands were bound tightly behind his back with plastic slip-cuffs. He had stumbled for the second time when one of the Marines took him by the shoulder and guided him to the far wall, where he could see the glowing digital readout of a security lock plate.
Kamara tapped in a code, then peeled off a glove and placed his palm flat against the plate. It flashed yellow for a few seconds before finally going green. Ash hadn’t been able to make out the doorway in the shadowy gloom of the tunnel; but when it began to slide open, the yellow glow of interior lights outlined the breadth and height of it, nearly as wide as the tunnel itself. The door opened into what looked like a storage area, stacked high with plastic tubs with government markings.
Not Fleet markings, Ash noted. Most likely procured and supplied by the DSI. Fox had told them they’d been behind the mission, and he had to think they’d constructed the base as well. The Department of Security and Intelligence was as notorious for the labyrinthian trails of its funding as it was for its incestuous ties to the Corporate Council.
Stacked opposite the full containers were three times as many empty ones. Ash wondered how much food they’d started out with and how much they could have left after six years. This world didn’t seem like it had much in the way of raw material for the food processors, so when the soy paste and the spirulina powder was gone, they’d be trying to find some way to eat the algae…or each other.
The storage area was bright, and well-lit, and deserted. Not a soul met them, which surprised Ash. He was sure Kamara had been radioing ahead to the base, and he was just as sure that the arrival of an outsider and the prospect of rescue would be huge news to the survivors. Why wasn’t there a crowd? He would have asked, but there was something intimidating about being marched in with his hands cuffed behind him, and he didn’t think Kamara was the type to answer questions.
He kept sneaking glances at the open corridor that was the main and the largest exit from the storage room, expecting a crowd of people to come and rubberneck at the new guys, but no one did.
“Take the injured man to the clinic,” Kamara told the Marines who’d been carrying Singh. His voice sounded tinny over the helmet’s external speakers. “Make sure he’s strapped down securely and one of you stay there to guard him.”
They didn’t carry Singh through the central corridor; instead, they took him off to the right, to what looked like a cargo elevator. Kamara watched them disappear behind the closing doors of the lift before he turned back to Ash and Fontenot.
“Follow me and keep quiet,” he instructed tersely.
The broad corridor twisted around like a mountain road, curving downward through switchbacks, with doors randomly spaced on the inside walls of the curves. All were closed, none were labelled, and as they descended level after level, they had yet to encounter a soul.
“Does anyone else live here,” Fontenot wondered aloud, “or have they all gone stir-crazy and you’ve got them locked in the basement?”
“I said keep quiet,” Kamara snapped, not pausing in his long-legged stride.
“It’s a damn strange way to treat guests, especially the first ones you’ve had in six years.”
Now he did stop, rounding on her.
“Guests don’t generally drop in riding one of our own escape capsules. You look a lot more like Pirate World shitbags than Fleet Intelligence agents.”
Ash couldn’t see the man’s face through his helmet’s visor, but he was fairly certain the Gunny wasn’t smiling.
“Is that why you have everyone cleared out of the area?” Fontenot guessed. “You think we’re bandits and you don’t want to get their hopes up?”
“I follow orders.” The words were biting, with the twist of a sneer to them. “I’d think someone who claims to have been a Sergeant-Major would understand that.”
“It’s been a while,” the old woman said with a grin. “I’m out of practice.”
“If you don’t shut up,” the Marine NCO warned her humorlessly, “I’ll have you butt-stroked upside the head and thrown in the brig until the Commander decides what to do with you.”
“Oh, I’d like to see you try.” Fontenot’s grin was cold and challenging and Ash swallowed hard, tensing himself. He knew that she could break the flex cuffs any time she wanted to, and he wondered if the Marines had figured out she was a cyborg.
“Is there a problem, Gunny?”
Ash turned at the voice, and so did the Marine NCO. The man walking up the corridor was short, and homely, and pale, and pinch-faced, and everything Kamara was not. He wore a set of patched and faded blue Space Fleet utilities with a Chief Petty Officer’s rank on the shoulder.
“Negative, Chief, Weaver” Kamara said after a moment’s hesitation. “I was just escorting the prisoners to Commander Busick.”
“I don’t think it’s been established that anyone’s a prisoner yet, Gunny,” the little man corrected him. “But I’ll tell you what.” He glanced between Ash and Fontenot. “You take the gentleman to the Commander’s office and loan me a couple of your men, and I’ll speak to the lady in the primary conference room. That sound good?”
“Yes, Chief.” He didn’t sound happy about it, but as he’d said before, he followed orders.
“And let’s get these cuffs off, Gunny,” the CPO told him, his voice gently chiding.
Kamara grunted, but slipped a combat knife out of a sheath on his armored vest and sliced through the plastic cuffs on Ash’s wrists. Ash rubbed at them, trying to work feeling back into his hands. The Gunny took a step toward Fonte
not but stopped at the sound of a loud snap. She held up the broken plastic binder, wiggling it demonstratively in front of the Marine’s face before tossing it on the floor.
“I’m good,” she assured him, fists on her hips.
Kamara slammed the knife back into its sheath.
“Ramirez and Jansen, go with Chief Weaver and keep an eye on her. The rest of you with me.”
“Be good,” Ash adjured Fontenot, eyeing her doubtfully as she followed the CPO down the hallway. Her reply was a disdainful sniff.
The Commander’s office was another unmarked door, with the look of having been repurposed from a storage room or a workshop. There was a hollow, plastic sound to it when Kamara knocked and when the clear contralto called, “Come,” the sound penetrated as if the door wasn’t there.
The Commander rose as they entered, her chair cheap and plastic and looking distinctly uncomfortable, her desk little more than a folding table with an old, physical keyboard and a work tablet. She was a tall woman who might once have seemed statuesque but now looked too thin and haggard, frayed around the edges. Her light brown hair was longer than regulation by a few centimeters, her fatigues as patched and beat up as Weaver’s had been and the creases around her eyes and mouth spoke of years of stress and isolation. She reminded him of a ragged scarecrow, but her blue eyes still seemed clear and perceptive.
“Good morning,” she said, coolly casual, as if he were her third appointment on a busy day. “I’m Commander Busick.”
She extended a hand and he shook it, feeling Kamara’s eyes watching him intently, ready for any hint of a threat to his commanding officer.
“Pleasure to meet you, ma’am,” he said. “I’m…”