“No Mam. Dr. Fisher signed off after I acknowledged that I had received and understood her last message. Wow, I never expected to sense her mind on that last series of null Jumps. I had Tapped her mind before of course, in the few days after I became a TG1. Her mind ‘flavor’ was obvious to me. She also told me that Bradley, Captain Greeves second son, is a TG2 now. He has all of the Koban mods, as do most of the TGs on the crew. Bradley told Maggi the cats were right. Most people do have strong odors. I think general hygiene will improve, particularly with boys, once they all can smell their own feet.” Her laugh was light and pleasant.
Laughing with her, Noreen told her to go down and place the cube in one of the single ships. She had been tempted to let one of the other TGs pilot it down, but decided that Karl could remotely operate it, and despite the lack of planetary defenses here, there was no need to risk anyone, however slight the danger was.
After leaving the shadow of the gas giant, the Avenger returned to a low orbit over Heavyside. Still stealthed, Noreen rotated the ship to place the internal docking station for the single ship facing away from the planet, and its ground based radars. She had Karl open the small outer hatch, making a brief hole in their stealth coverage. Karl remotely piloted the single ship out, having switched on its own stealth mode, and flew it towards the location of SOB-1 below.
The small craft would arrive in darkness, since even stealthed from radar, and set to mimic the sky or background for potential watchers on the ground, its motion might be noticed as a ripple passing in front of clouds or mountains in daylight. At night, a few added twinkles to the stars should not be noticed. There was a normally dry ravine near SOB-1, and the ship was lightly set down in that, less than a mile from the base security fence. It was a few hundred feet outside a perimeter road, which motorized patrols followed around the fence at random intervals.
Although the base conducted classified spec ops training, and conducted radical surgery to embed state of the art technological enhancements in their troopers, it was not a high security secret installation. The Krall could care less, and there was no human enemy from which to hide the technology.
One of the TGs would need to sneak off the base, enter the small ship and retrieve the data cube and a small tissue sample, and return. The tissue sample was taken from Macy, the Avenger’s Chief Engineer (the former Drive Rat was the only maintenance person aboard, actually, and an SG). She and Noreen were technically both just SGs, but Noreen had also long ago opted to receive the parallel Koban nervous system gene mod, in order to pass it on to her children. Macy had not done that, so her tissue was proof of concept that the clone DNA changes described on the cube were possible, and had been performed successfully. It did not reveal the Koban genes for an organic superconducting nervous system. That was a detail passed by Maggi, through her messages to Alyson, which might have slipped by Noreen. Help them, but don’t reveal all of the genome changes, not before you knew what sort of reception that would have.
The intent was to later slip into one of the areas declared off limits to trainees, and leave the cube and tissue sample inside Lisa Markel’s living quarters, with Noreen’s carefully composed note, untraceable to the three TGs in the camp. Her work area was probably too secure for the TGs to penetrate without being detected, and it was certainly not private. There was no way of knowing if they might encounter her in an interview room again. Besides, to pass it to her anonymously, none of them could simply leave it on her temporary auditorium Living Plastic desk, bare but for a screen and keyboard, let alone walk up to her and say, “Here, keep this data confidential. It contains the death penalty level knowledge of human genetics you wanted, you’re welcome.”
In the days just before the single ship landed, scheduled to arrive on a Friday night, Jorl verified with a corporal that on his few free hours on Saturday night, he would be permitted to run the one-mile oval track around the obstacle course. It drew him an odd look, a trainee asking to run more, after three weeks of running and daily exercises to acclimate them to Heavyside. However, there was no objection, so long as he made the head count for bed check, and got up when rousted out Sunday morning.
He made his runs much slower than when they were timed on training runs, a jogging pace, which took eleven minutes per one-mile lap in the 1.41 g gravity. He did four slow laps in case anyone had bothered to watch him in the darkness. Heavyside had no moons, and due to the plane of the orbit and the orientation of this hemisphere for SOB-1, even the band of light from the galactic core was always below the horizon. With no one on the obstacle course, and its lights off, a dim glow from the barracks was all that spilled over to the far side of the track, and the twelve-foot razor wire toped fence it paralleled for over a quarter mile.
One of the random truck patrols had been by twelve minutes ago, so when Jorl turned onto the backside stretch for the fifth lap, he checked all around for possible observers. Lacking IR vision, he saw mostly dark of course. He’d kept his eyes trained away from the barracks lights to retain his dark adaptation. There was some starlight and a local zodiacal glow near where the sun had set. He started a fast run down the dirt track, setting his feet as softly as he could, to hide the increase in tempo, kicking up spurts of dust.
For his muscles, the leap, layout and twist as he passed three feet over the coiled razor wire was easy. He pivoted to land on his feet, still at a dead run, and headed for the darker slash that would be the line of the ravine.
Despite his reflexes, he was startled by a pair of damned mating rabbits he failed to see in the darkness. They separated with a squeal right at his feet, and ran off into the grass and low brush. He mentally apologized for the interruption. The only purpose he, Fred, and Yil had come up with for the camp’s fence he just jumped over was to keep the frigging rabbits outside. The all-volunteer trainees were not only allowed to quit at any time, they were loudly, and frequently “encouraged” by their taskmasters to do so, to give up and go home to mama.
At breakfast, Fred had heard a private that ran some of the “rabbit patrols,” as he called them, complain of the boredom of having to do that job. They drove the perimeter road without lights, using their IR senses to pick out the warmer dirt roadway from the grasses, and the frequently humping rabbits. In daylight, the trainees had seen road kill a number of times before scavengers removed the carcasses in the morning. IR vision or not, the bored drivers appeared to enjoy a deadly game with the sweet little plentiful bunnies. Jorl was also concerned with being spotted by them, since his high metabolism would have him glowing larger than a rabbit, from a considerable distance away.
On a Link two days earlier, Karl had detailed the designated landing area, where in the dark it should be possible to line up a barracks door light with an obstruction light on a radio tower, which would put him on a line with where Karl would park the single ship in the ravine.
Slipping down into the six-foot deep ravine, Jorl moved towards lining up the red radio tower light and the barracks door light. The skin of the single ship was set to project the dim background images on its opposite sides, so Jorl nearly ran into the rounded nose of the craft before he saw how the overhead stars were being projected downwards on its underside. For the benefit of the hypothetical observer, lying on the ground under the craft, he supposed with amusement.
He quickly went around the side to feel for the faint depressions of the keypad, and tapped the open code. The hatch shifted out a few inches, then rotated over the top to provide access. He didn’t touch the controls and simply picked up the note, cube, and sample vial, inside a small clear plastic bag lying on the operator’s seat. Slipping that inside his jumpsuit, he closed the hatch and started back down the ravine to the closest place to the fence, where he had jumped over. His internal time sense told him he could easily get back over the fence, and run ahead to where his slow jog would have placed him by now, where the track bends away from the fence.
He was on the verge of jumping to the rim of the ravine when he
heard the sound of tires on dirt. A random patrol made the corner turn around the fence a quarter mile away, driving rather fast in the dark. It was faster than the patrol vehicles normally drove. It set Jorl’s mind working quickly. He didn’t know for certain, but assumed there must be a set of sensors they were unaware of, which had detected his movements outside the fence.
He continued along the ravine, keeping low so his IR glowing head would not be seen peeping over the rim. He scared another rabbit, which he quickly overtook in a crouched run and dive, and caught it by the hind legs. It squealed, so he placed a hand over its muzzle and squeezed. It tried to bite him. He had a half-baked plan to use the rabbit somehow, as a distraction. He heard the sliding tires on dirt, as the otherwise quiet electric vehicle came to a halt on the roadway. They definitely were looking for something or someone.
The ravine angled closer to the fence farther down, and the patrol road was squeezed closer to the fence because of that. He was nearly fifty feet from the point where he had entered the ravine, and from the blockage of starlight on the rim above there were low bushes there, so he risked lifting his face high enough to see through the base stems. He could make out one man walking along the fence, and the other seemed to be moving from their vehicle towards the ravine.
They were not using flashlights, so somehow they were employing their IR implants, apparently following his steps. It had been so recent that he supposed his prints were marginally warmer, or perhaps had disturbed a warmer layer to reveal cooler material below. Regardless, they were both now moving towards the ravine, where he had entered. He had a plan, and the rabbit wasn’t going to like it one bit. He even needed it to be able to squeal, so he couldn’t do this a merciful way. The ripper would chastise him if he shared this with Kim, the now grown cub he sometimes had hunted with at home. Perhaps the rabbit might survive, who knew?
Jorl waited until he saw the first man drop into the ravine, and the other was walking on the edge above, away from him. Both were apparently following his double foot trail towards the stealthed single ship.
He placed his right hand under the rabbit’s rump, his left still pressed hard over the muzzle, holding the wriggling animal in his hand as he drew his right arm back. With a Kobani muscled powered throw, the nine-pound animal (jackrabbits were technically a hare, not a rabbit), flew in a high arc out over the flats away from the ravine, just beyond the two men sixty feet away.
In an appreciated bit of cooperation, the terrified animal made no squeal until just before the arc reached the ground, perhaps twenty feet ahead and to the right of the searchers. Whether it saw the ground coming or finally recovered from the fear it was about to be eaten, it squalled more than squealed, with the sound interrupted as it hit the grass. It survived that impact and promptly squealed again, as it found its feet and started running.
Jorl had not waited to see if both men would react and look where the noise came from. He simply leaped up and over the ravine rim an instant before his internal timer said the impact would occur. There would be no better moment for him to be exposed, and he landed as softly as possible and dashed towards the nearby fence.
He glanced once over his right shoulder as he ran, and saw both men, now on the far side of the ravine, running away from his position. Energy coursed through his body, and he made a headlong leap up and over the fence, clearing it by at least five feet, and did a tuck and roll in midair to land on his feet, bending knees nearly to the ground, also using his hands to absorb the impact as softly and quietly as possible. He stayed low and raced directly for a hard packed area with hundreds of footprints, and angled towards the barracks.
He used his transducer to send in the blind to the Avenger. “A perimeter road patrol spotted me outside the fence, but I got away. I’m safely inside the camp, but you need to fly the single ship away before they find it in the ravine.”
The reply from Karl surprised him. “Sir, I picked up your transducer signal from the relay in the single ship. I have just lifted it off as quietly as I could, and it is now well to the south and climbing. The onboard visual sensors showed the patrol never turned around as it departed.”
Jorl slowed as he approached the lighted area, and went around his assigned building, and casually walked in a door on the side away from the track and practice field. He nodded to a couple of men he saw, and thanks to his mods and gravity adaptations, he wasn’t even sweating. His heart rate was up a little from the rush of excitement, and he forced his breathing to be normal, but he looked cool and casual. He didn’t even have dust on his black jumpsuit. He did a local Link to Fred and Yil, and asked them to retrieve the “object” while he took a shower. They had made certain they had conspicuous alibies while he was out of the compound.
He was still in the shower when the attention getting horn sounded on the speaker system and an announcement was made for everyone to assemble in front of the barracks in platoon ranks. “NOW!” was the emphatic final word.
Naked and wet, Jorl retrieved his spare clean jumpsuit, checking the one he’d just worn that day to confirm the bag was gone. He tossed the jumpsuit in the common use cleaner module closest to his bunk, and ran outside carrying his boots and fell in at his usual position on the front right corner of the formation. He wasn’t the last to arrive, and under the glares of a corporal and a sergeant, he slipped his bare damp feet into his self-sealing boots.
In the ranks of the facing men for the barracks next to his, he saw Fred in the first spot of the second row, for the second squad of his platoon. He looked over at Jorl and nodded slightly, confirming he was the one that retrieved the data cube.
The six barracks were in two rows, and now the two buildings at the end were darkened after two platoons worth of washouts or dropouts had cut their numbers down to four platoons in a single “hell week.” The rumor mill had it that the washout and dropout rate would slow now, but certainly not end. They would be fortunate to have two full platoons remaining when time came for the surgical implants, in four more months of training time.
Thirty-two men left out of over two thousand hopefuls that arrived at the orbital station. Many of those arrivals were selectively recruited and filtered before then. The high numbers of “walk-ins” were normally the first to be eliminated, and less than ten percent of those people made it down to Port Andropov. Not many of those made it to SOB-1 for “hell week.”
SFC Norris walked down the center lane between the rows of men, looking extremely unhappy. He was in charge of training, even though the day-to-day interaction for the last week had largely been with corporals for the trainees, and occasionally with several Staff Sergeants. “Hell week” was “weeding,” to remove the next weaker links, and didn’t require actual training, per se.
The staff’s AIs had already provided a complete head count, and even the arrival times noted for the last men to reach formation. However, Norris knew someone had certainly left the compound. Those trainees in the camp were free to dropout anytime, but there was a procedure for that, and climbing the fence and walking away wasn’t part of that process.
The seismic alarm that was detected at the perimeter patrol’s duty station, located by the main gate, had caused the diversion of the single mobile patrol unit from its random route. The unit was next to the civilian housing section, and was rushed over to the road that ran just outside the fence by the training course. The two privates IR senses saw faint heat traces on the ground that looked as if someone had walked away from the fence towards a nearby gully. The seismic sensor was buried under the roadway, as a strip that ran entirely around the camp. It was primarily intended to pick up vehicle traffic, but the AI was programmed to identify foot traffic as well. It had detected an impact of human-sized mass beside the roadway, as if a person had jumped down from the top of the fence, and who then crossed the road, moving away from the camp, fading with distance.
The two privates followed the fading heat trail to the gully, and could see double heat splotches in one directio
n along its bottom, and a single set in the opposite direction. To stay together, they went in the direction of the presumed double trail, while calling for another patrol unit to be dispatched.
They subsequently went running off into the open scrub brush on the other side of the gully, in pursuit of what proved to have been a jackrabbit. Because it had squealed loudly, they had assumed it had encountered one of the supposed individuals that made the tracks. However, all they spotted was the heat trace of the still running rabbit as it vanished over a small rise. Then they were told there were faint footsteps detected back on the roadway, so they rushed back in that direction, just as the second unit arrived from the other direction.
None of them had seen anything larger than a rabbit. However, when they used flashlights, they could easily make out boot prints in the gully. The dry road was so hard packed that it didn’t leave prints. There was no sign anyone had climbed a twelve-foot fence with coiled wire on top, and sharp edged mesh woven to keep fingers and toes away.
Nevertheless, the AI insisted that someone had run away from the fence, and ran back several minutes later. The inference was someone in the camp left and returned. That was when Norris was brought in, to have his people account for all the trainees, and get them into a formation for a head count.
When one of the original patrolling privates followed the double tracks in the gully, he noted by flashlight that a double set of tracks actually went both ways. He went to where they ended, and saw a smooth long depression in the sandy soil, and some crushed bushes pressed into the ground. There had been no rains to flood the area for weeks, so it had to have been formed recently and presumably that night.
Now the minor issue of perhaps a trainee climbing the fence on a lark, to see if the grass was greener on the other side, had been elevated into having met with someone outside, who had arrived and departed in some sort of small craft. When Norris heard that report, he called 1SG Crager.
Koban: Rise of the Kobani Page 37