“Stand by, Lion Three,” Taggart said, realizing that Cortez was about to take exception to his decision. “All right, Doctor, what is it this time?”
“Captain, I understand your concern for your man. I’m worried about him too, and Dr. Ake. But I’m even more concerned for the survivors at the crash site. From what Sergeant Frost says, it sounds like they’re both dead. One or both of them has lost a helluva lot of blood, and Ake lost his helmet. There is no way he could have survived this long without it. I’m sorry to put it that bluntly, Captain, but that’s the way it sounds to me.”
“So what do you want me to do, Lieutenant?” Taggart asked sharply. “Just walk away and leave them without knowing if they’re dead, wounded, captured, or whatever? Is that what you’d want me to do if it was you lying back there alone, maybe bleeding to death, maybe captured by the Neo-Sovs? I thought you were a doctor. I thought you had a responsibility to the people under your care. What about that, Lieutenant? Isn’t Kowalski a patient of yours?”
“Dammit, Captain. You know that’s not it,” Cortez shot back, her eyes blazing. “You may not like me, but don’t you dare tell me I don’t care about those men. I’m not running away from this just because I’m Mexican.”
“Mexican? What does that . . .”
“I care about those men more than you’ll ever know, Captain.” Cortez ran on as though she hadn’t heard his startled interruption. “But as much as I care about Ake and Kowalski, I care far more about the people who have been down on this hellhole of a planet for two weeks now.
“Ake and Kowalski are dead, you know that as well as I do. But those people over there might still be alive. We can’t risk all of them for two men. Once we reach Cabot and pull out her survivors, we’ll be coming back this way, right? We can look for the bodies then. But for now, we cannot delay this mission any longer.”
Captain Taggart felt a slow burn of anger creeping up the back of his neck. No one had given him a dressing down like that since he was a first-year midshipman at Annapolis. And Cortez’s half-stated accusation of racism merely added fuel to the fire.
To Captain Maxwell Taggart, there was no difference. So long as a person did their job and earned their way, without special consideration for race, nationality, or position, then everything ran smoothly. What he hated was favoritism of any kind.
Taking a few breaths to control the anger that was rising in his throat, Taggart grudgingly realized that Cortez was right. Kowalski could not have gone far on his own, and Dr. Ake could not have survived more than a minute or so without the protection of his environment suit’s helmet; nor would he have voluntarily left his charge.
“Sergeant Frost.” He paused and sighed. “Gunny, bring your squad in. As much as I hate to do it, we’re gonna have to call Ake and Kowalski missing. We can’t hold up the mission any longer.”
12
An odd scuttling sound, like mice moving across the loose rocky soil, caught Rick Dade’s attention. He held up his left hand in a signal for Krista Black to halt, but she had already frozen in place. Her tense posture showed an anxiousness that was far from normal for her. Dade searched the deep, shadowed crevices that bordered the trail, straining to discover the source of the noise.
A kilometer or so above the cliff where Abraham Ake and Leo Kowalski had vanished, the “Roman road” came to an abrupt end. The heavy paving flags gave way to a footpath beaten into the dark red-brown soil. Loose rocks, ranging in size from that of Dade’s gloved fist to small, flat, coin-sized wafers, dotted the trail.
Leaving the paved road seemed to be a signal to the scouts’ subconscious. Barely a hundred meters past the end of the road, Black spun in a quarter circle, snapping up her Pitbull to cover a deeply shadowed niche in the rock face. She claimed to have seen something move in the gloomy recess, but when the scouts investigated it, they found nothing but an empty, shallow crack in the rock. In the two hours since that first, anxious false alarm, Dade and Black had been brought up short by a half dozen other nonexistent contacts.
At first, Dade had been willing to write off their disquiet as a reaction to the mysterious disappearance of their teammates. Until now.
“Rick . . .” Black began, but Dade waved her to silence. The Maw stood high overhead, a bit past its zenith. The strange light it gave cast odd shadows, in some places faint, in others deep. He could see a hulking black shape in the deeper gloom beneath a house-sized boulder that nearly closed off the trail fifteen meters ahead of him. At first he thought the form was just another rock, strangely weathered by whatever natural forces this ugly planet had. But the longer he gazed at the shape, the more certain he became that it had moved, and that movement had caused the odd rustling sound he had heard.
Dade carefully brought up his assault rifle. He settled the front post over the dark mass, centering it in the ghostly ring of his rear peep sight, but kept his finger off the weapon’s trigger. For three long breaths he waited for the shape to react, but the shadowy figure remained still. A prickling sensation on the back of his neck told him that Krista Black had finally spotted his target and had brought her rifle up to cover it.
Without lowering his weapon, Dade began moving forward. Slowly, carefully he moved one foot, searching with his toes to make certain his footing would be good before transferring his weight to that leg. All of his senses seemed to be in high gear. He could see the dark shape as a slightly blacker patch in the gloom of the boulder’s shadow. He could hear the crunch of stones shifting under his weight, smell and taste the slightly stale flavor of his environment suit’s respirator mask, feel the uneven surface beneath his feet and the reassuring weight of his rifle stock in his hands. He had never felt more alive, and yet he felt the presence of death in that lurking shadow.
Dade had gone three steps when the shape moved. It didn’t move much, or far, but it most definitely moved. And, there had been a faint gleam in the heart of the darkness, like moonlight on a naked steel knife blade. The scout dropped to his knees. The sharp clatter of scattering pebbles mingled with a rapid, soft, thudding sound. Under the other noises Dade was able to make out a flat hissing growl that might have been a voice gabbling curses. The shape vanished into the hills beyond the huge rock. In a single uncoiling motion, Dade was on his feet, moving quickly as he darted for the shadow of the boulder. Behind him, Krista Black moved into position to cover his advance.
Dade slammed to a stop and put his back against the boulder. The jolt of flesh hitting rock was almost a joyful feeling to the Marine. It meant he was alive and engaged in the very activity he seemed to have been created for. A quick glance at Krista Black to ensure that she was ready to cover his play, and Dade spun around the corner of the huge rock, his rifle coming up into the firing position.
Beyond the boulder lay a broad expanse of relatively level ground. Rocks the size of small bushes dotted the plateau. Nothing moved in the rocky, open ground.
“Rick?”
“Yeah, Krista,” Dade said, putting up his gun. “It’s clear over here.”
“I’m coming up.”
“Come ahead.” Though to an outsider, the exchange might have seemed silly, or condescending on Dade’s part, it served an important purpose. In scouts’ heightened state of readiness and awareness, the unexpected appearance of even his partner at Dade’s side might have triggered an attack.
“What the hell was that?” Black’s voice had taken on an almost-waspish hum. Dade knew his partner was naturally curious, and took mysteries of any kind as a challenge to be solved. These traits contributed to her success as a scout, but often made her seem short-tempered when thwarted.
“I dunno, Krista,” Dade answered, scanning the plain once again. “Whatever it was, it vanished into thin air.”
As he turned to face his partner, something drew his attention toward the ground.
“Krista, take a look at this.” Dade stooped and gestured at a faint impression in a thin layer of loose dust that had built up at the base of the ro
ck.
Black dropped to one knee and leaned over the spot Dade indicated.
“Rick, that’s impossible.” Black leaned in a bit closer to examine the single footprint.
“What is?” Dade knew the answer, but felt reluctant to say it.
“We’ve got a bare human footprint. But humans can’t go barefoot on this rock because of the atmosphere,” Black responded. “But then again, I doubt that he’s human. Look at this guy. His feet are absolutely flat. The print has no arch whatsoever. He’s got five toes, and they show no signs of separation or crowding. I’d bet he never wore any kind of foot gear. Sandals would separate the toes where the thongs went, and shoes, even well-fitting ones, tend to crowd the toes a bit.
“Besides, look here.” Black gestured with her knife. “I don’t think our boy ever clipped his toenails. See these gouges. They were left by his nails, or should I say his claws?”
Dade looked closely at the print as Black described it. “Any ideas?”
“Well, at first I thought it might have been a Zhykee,” she replied. “But the briefing materials we’ve seen suggest that they’ve got long, narrow feet. Naw, this doesn’t feel like Zhykee.”
“Growlers, then, maybe a pup?”
“Again, no. If it was a Growler that left this track, it would be a heck of a lot deeper. Those critters are big and heavy. They wouldn’t leave such a shallow track.” Black shook her head. “Even if it was a pup, they’ve only got three toes, and the claw marks would be far more pronounced. In any event, I doubt that a Growler, even a pup, would have run away from just the two of us.”
“So what do you think?”
“Well, Rick, if the captain is right about the Neo-Sovs,” Black said, straightening from her crouch. “I think what we’re looking at here might be a Cyclops’s track. It doesn’t really match the ‘standard-issue Cyclops,’ but I’d guess the Sovs might be field testing a ‘new model’ or something like that. Either that, or we’re dealing with some new kind of alien critter.”
“Yeah.” Dade sighed. “In either case, we’d better call this one in.”
* * *
“Record it, and keep moving,” Captain Taggart told the scouts. “That’s about all we can do until we have something more solid to go on.”
“Falcon will comply,” Dade said, and switched his communicator to standby.
Kneeling over the track, Dade aimed the small video camera attached to the right side of his helmet at the footprint, and held it there for a few seconds before carefully moving around the track so as to provide an all-aspect image. At last he switched the camera off. Pulling a dataclip from a pouch on his combat harness, Dade downloaded the image stored in the recorder’s onboard memory into the permanent-storage device. Once the download was complete, Dade ejected and stowed the clip, hefted his rifle, and nodded to Krista Black.
“You wanna go first?”
“Oh thanks, Rick.” She chuckled. “That’s it, send the girl out first, so if I get wasted by some new Neo-Sov monster, you’ll at least have a little bit of warning, right?”
Dade laughed in return. No one in the platoon looked on Krista Black as a “girl,” any more than they would consider Gunnery Sergeant Frost to be a “girl.” To the mind of everyone in the platoon, they, and every other female member of the outfit, were Marines first. Anything else was secondary. Everyone in Taggart’s platoon was treated equally.
“Sure, Krista,” Dade answered. “You know you’re my chum, don’t you?”
Black let out a full-throated laugh at the old running joke between them. She and Rick Dade were indeed friends of the highest degree, but the word had another meaning: the cut-up bloody fish parts used to bait sharks. It was a bit of gallows humor that said that scouts were often used as bait by their fellow Marines. It was a bit of humor that, for the most part, wasn’t true.
Shaking her head in amusement, Black hefted her rifle and moved off down the trail.
Half an hour later, she and Dade were once again hunched over another sign that the Marines were not alone, either on the planet or in their use of the mountain trail.
Unlike the previous contact, where only a single track could be found, this latest spoor showed the passage of a number of the barefoot creatures.
Black looked at the ground in front of her. When they encountered the trail, she quickly picked out a set of tracks that was different from the others. The creature that had made those signs must have broken its foot at one time, but the injury had not been properly treated. Thus, when the damage healed, it left the inside of the right foot with an odd bump just behind the toes. She measured the creature’s stride and determined it to be around forty-five centimeters, roughly the same as a normal, unburdened human’s. From there it was a relatively simple task to mark out a forty-five-centimeter box, using one of the odd tracks as a reference point, and count the tracks which fell within its confines.
“How many?” Dade asked.
“Eight. But there’s something else. See these long, skinny marks, here, and here, and here?” Black pointed at the deep gouges in the soil with the tip of her combat knife. “At first I thought those were drag marks, but they’re too regular, too well defined. They’ve gotta be tracks, but I’m not too sure what left them. At least, I don’t wanna think about what I think may have left them.”
“Krista?” Dade prompted.
“A spider. A big-ass spider. I’m guessing it’s some kind of weapon platform, or transport unit with spider legs rather than wheels or tracks.”
“The Sovs don’t have anything like that in their arsenal, do they?”
“Not that I know of,” Black answered as she activated her helmet recorder camera. “Something’s going on here Rick, and I don’t like it.”
13
“Lion, this is Falcon. We’re at local grid Whiskey-Foxtrot-six-six-three. We’ve cleared the hills and have visual contact with the wreck.”
Captain Taggart lifted his hand to wave Gunnery Sergeant Frost over to him, but the gesture was unnecessary. Frost must have been monitoring the command frequency and was already making her way toward her commanding officer. Lieutenant Cortez was right on Frost’s heels. As they made their way along the narrow trail, Taggart pulled from his breast pocket the strip map that had been computer-generated from the assault boat’s sensors. The coordinates Dade had given were close to the left-hand edge of the chart and about a kilometer west of the platoon’s current position.
“Got it, Falcon. Hold your position until the rest of the platoon catches up. We’re about three-zero minutes behind you.”
“Roger that,” Dade answered laconically.
“Dade and Black have a visual on Cabot,” he told the women, as they approached him. He touched the chart with a gloved forefinger. “They’re just about here, if we can trust these blasted maps.”
Frost looked at the chart.
“Y’know, boss, it’s gonna be dark soon. It’s at least another five klicks from where Dade is to the ship. Suggest we join up with the scouts, bivouac on their position, and start out again in the morning.”
“Captain, we’ve taken almost two days to cross these bloody mountains,” Cortez protested. “If we don’t press on, it will be at least another full day before we reach the ship. I’m afraid we’ll lose the survivors if we wait too long.”
“I know all that, Doctor. But I have a few concerns, too,” Taggart said wearily. He pointed at the map again. “Look here. See how close those contour lines are? I know map-reading isn’t a skill they push in the Navy, but it should be obvious that close contour lines mean a steep slope. This thing is damn near vertical. Descending that slope is going to be dangerous enough in daylight. There is no way we can try it in the dark.”
“Besides,” Gunny Frost put in, “there are those unknown contacts that Dade and Black have been having. If they’re Neo-Sovs, they’ll be watching us. We stand a better chance against an ambush if we’re in bivouac, with sentries, than we would making a night march, es
pecially over bad terrain.”
“That’s only part of it, Gunny,” Taggart cut in. “I’m more concerned about the actual descent. So far, we’ve had it pretty easy on this climb. We’ve only had a couple of really rough spots. But this”—he tapped the chart again—“this is going to be hard going. My troops could manage it, and maybe a few of your medics. The bulk of your people are going to need all the help they can get, and descending this slope in the dark isn’t going to be any help to them at all. I’m sorry, Doctor, but my decision stands. We bivouac on Dade’s position, and start out at first light.”
“Yes, sir,” Cortez snapped sarcastically, plainly unhappy with Taggart’s ruling and with her inability to reason him out of his decision.
“Y’know something, boss?” Frost said, watching Cortez stalk away. “That woman may be a first-class pain in the butt, but I’ve got this feeling that, if I ever needed a doc, she’d be the first one I’d want working on me.”
“You’re probably right, Gunny.” Taggart nodded in agreement. “I wouldn’t want her in a combat unit, but I’d definitely want her around after the shooting stopped.”
He sighed, then said, “All right, Gunny, we’ve got about an hour before dark. Let’s keep ’em moving as quick as we can. I’d like to reach Dade as soon as we can. If we’re lucky, we might get a look a the wreck before the light goes completely.”
* * *
“There she is, sir,” Dade said, pointing off to the southwest. Taggart’s gaze followed the gesture and fell on a light gray arrow point resting on the valley floor. At a distance of over five thousand meters, he could barely see the vessel with his naked eye, but the powerful electronic binoculars made the details of the wrecked survey vessel frighteningly clear.
Cabot lay right side up on the valley floor. The after third of the vessel was gone, leaving a ragged mass of twisted metal where the massive engines had been. At first look, the rest of the ship seemed to be relatively intact. Then, as Taggart studied the wreck, he could see that she had been twisted along her long axis, and the hull had been split along the spine like a boned fish. Viewing the wreck through the electronic binoculars gave the scene an odd unreal quality. The ruined survey ship looked like a model assembled by a gigantic hobbyist and placed in the narrow valley, rather than a real spacecraft that had crash-landed on an alien world.
VOR 06 Operation Sierra-75 Page 9