“Of course I would. I didn’t enter this service in the belief that my work would be put to civilian uses.”
Hémery could tell how much it had hurt her to admit that. She seemed fanatical in her conviction that the scientists were organized in the only possible way, and that everything was perfectly rational. Just like all the rest. No wonder they were killing each other off. Maybe they were just trying to save the blobs the trouble of doing it for themselves.
“And Sandrina? Do you know of anyone who wanted her gone?” He already knew the answer to this one, but needed to hear Irene’s take.
The scientist laughed. “Sandrina? I think we all wanted her dead. The way she pranced around shaking her ass at anything male was just disgusting. And from what I heard, she wouldn’t stop at just shaking. She wanted to test drive every member of the crew.” Irene smirked as if she’d said something clever. It was probably an in-joke among the scientists, one that every one of them had already repeated to Hémery when he’d asked them about the dead scientist.
He shook his head. The rumors were probably true, and after having studied pictures of the missing scientist, he found himself wishing that her proclivities had extended to crewmembers outside of the science ranks. “Anyone in particular who hated her?”
“Not that I know of, but you should probably ask any of the married women. Or even the ones with a new shipboard relationship. None of the men said no to Sandrina, and she, for her part, knew how to keep her mouth shut, so maybe a wife of a married man found something out that the rest of us didn’t know about.”
“All, right, I’ll look into it.” He already had, and it had been frustratingly inconclusive. “Is there anything else you can think of that might help me?”
“No.”
“Could you tell me where you were when they disappeared?”
“When did they disappear?”
“We’re not sure,” he admitted. He’d been trying to trap her, and by the way she looked at him, she was aware of it.
“Well, if you manage to figure it out, let me know and I’ll try to tell you where I was. Probably in my cabin. Either there or in my lab. That’s where I usually am.”
“Thank you. If I think of anything else, I’ll let you know.”
He sat there wondering. The tracking records on Irene were incomplete, but they were also incomplete on at least three others, not counting the two missing researchers who seemed to have been erased from the data stream.
Hémery sighed. This interview had left him feeling exactly the same as all the others. He was certain that Irene, like most of her colleagues, could cheerfully have killed the missing people under the correct circumstances—especially Sandrina—but probably hadn’t.
He wished he could ask for a transfer to one of the marine ships. When they killed themselves—over cards, sex, or drugs—it usually took all of thirty seconds to identify the culprit. The difficulty was usually to convince them to come quietly and that the dead trooper hadn’t had it coming.
He scratched his scar and wondered what to do next.
Chapter 13
Tristan felt an awful sense of déjà vu as the team approached the hangar on the east side of the clearing. In design, if not scale, the place could have been the twin of the ones on either moon. The only real difference was that the sky was bright with a greenish tinge as opposed to the darkness they’d experienced on the previous missions.
“Why do I have the feeling that this place isn’t going to make me any happier than the other two I walked into?” he asked himself over the Tacnet.
“Stop whining, trooper. You’re still alive and in one piece, aren’t you? I’m not even sure we’re allowed to pay you for the hours unless you can show us some injuries,” Sergeant Mobutu replied.
“I guess you’re right. Besides, I actually think that you guys are probably in more danger than I am. After all, the last time I landed, everyone else bought it and I only lost a piece of my suit.”
“This time you’ve got better marines with you, kid.”
“Time before that, my CO got herself so dented that they had to take her suit off with a can opener and toss her in the infirmary.”
“Yeah, saw a recording of that. We won’t make the same mistakes she did.”
Tristan wanted to defend Cora, but held his tongue. He knew the rules, and breaking them meant that he would probably get tagged with an accusation of being in love with her. He couldn’t say whether he was or wasn’t, but there was no way he’d give the marines an opening.
He found it strange that these men and women on the surface of an alien planet, with no ability to leave and with no food or water supplies, would be more concerned about razzing the newcomer to their ranks than worrying about their continued survival, but he wasn’t surprised by it. Every single shock marine unit he’d ever been a part of was exactly the same way. It was expected that the men and women who made up the platoons would die before admitting that they were afraid. And a good way to take your mind off the fear was to rib the new guy.
As they approached the hangar, they began to notice signs that everything was not exactly as it should be.
In the first place, the wide opening of the facility entrance had once held a colossal door. This had been blown apart and pieces were strewn hundreds of meters in front of the aperture. The marines had to pick their way over twisted metal spars.
“Wait,” the sergeant ordered, putting up a hand as a sign for them to stop. “Is anyone else worried about the fact that this debris was blown away from the facility?”
“No,” one of the marines pitched in. “That just means we don’t have to do it ourselves. Sounds good to me.”
Mobutu didn’t toggle the Tacnet, so Tristan couldn’t tell if he actually sighed, but the way he slumped inside his suit was clear enough. “I think what the sergeant meant to say was that he’s concerned that whatever blasted the door blasted it from the inside.”
“Yes. Thank you. Glad one of you was paying attention.”
“Coming this close to getting my ass shot off twice made me sensitive to that kind of thing, Sarge.”
The truth was that, until Mobutu had mentioned it, Tristan hadn’t recognized the implications of the debris pattern. But once it was pointed out, it became extremely obvious. There was no wreckage right in front of the facility, but, beginning about ten meters away, the debris field spread outward in a semicircular pattern.
Grass had begun to grow around some of the bigger pieces, where the weight of falling metal had cracked the surface of the parade ground. The debris, likewise, was corroded and the edges worn away. The explosion had clearly happened some time before. Probably years. It hadn’t been caused by the events of the day before.
“Something hit this door very hard.”
“Hope it’s not still in there.”
The company halted and the sergeant assigned two troops to scout ahead. They entered from either edge of the gargantuan opening, and hugged the walls as they penetrated the facility.
Holding back a couple of hundred meters, Tristan watched them and marveled at the size of the structure. From a distance, it was difficult to gauge scale, but with the tiny men dwarfed by the building, it left no doubts about what they were looking at. While the hangar structure around either of the moons he’d seen action on would have been just about large enough for Ian’s flyer, this one could easily have swallowed the Minstrel.
The scouts disappeared into the darkness, but soon enough they were back on the horn. “Guys, I think you can come in. If there was anything defending this facility, it’s dead now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hard to describe, but you might as well come have a look.”
The scouts were right. The hangar looked as if it had been torn to shreds by something big and angry. Chunks of building material were strewn everywhere, and even the ceiling seemed to have come under concentrated attack. It was so badly damaged that it took Tristan a few moments to realize that the destruction wa
s a result of attacks on gun emplacements similar to the ones he’d encountered so often in the other facilities.
The back wall, the one where the elevator shaft was inevitably located, had a ragged hole in it. They sent a scout to have a look.
“Big elevator shaft here. Don’t see the lift in it, but it might be at the bottom. This thing is very deep. It’s also pretty chewed up. Not sure what it was that hit this facility, but it was not happy. They shot at everything.”
“Thanks. Let’s get back outside.”
“What?” a marine asked. “Aren’t we going inside?”
This time, the sergeant did sigh over the Tacnet. “Why in the world would we want to do that? From what our friend Tristan tells us, going in these places is a good way to get hurt, and there’s no real value in doing so.”
“So why even come out here?”
“To make sure it wasn’t a threat.”
“I understand that, but shouldn’t we find out if the threat is still inside?”
Tristan spoke. “I can tell you what’s inside. It’s a containment facility for those flying wing things. Like the one on the moon of the ice giant, but on a much bigger scale. I wouldn’t be surprised that this is where the swarm—or at least a part of it—was locked up. We don’t want to run into them down there. Trust me on this.”
They discussed his idea as their suits loped back to where the ships and pilots had been left behind. The trek to the facility under the huge gravity and without the benefit of suits would have been too much for them.
“Not much of a prison, if you ask me.”
“Maybe it wasn’t meant to be, or maybe it was part of a system. The guys who locked the wings in here had to know that, sooner or later, one of them would get loose. And then…”
“That one probably broke out a couple more, until the defenders were swamped.”
“What I don’t understand is why bother to lock them up in the first place. If you had them under control, wouldn’t it just be easier to destroy them? I mean, why go to all the trouble to lock up drone fighters?”
“Who said they’re drones?”
“You saw them back on the Bard. There was nothing alive in there, just a bunch of circuits and stuff. Besides, they’re not big enough to be crewed.”
Assent met this statement from the shock marines who’d fought the swarm in the crew ship’s hangar. Tristan wondered about it, though. His impression of the one he’d seen on the ice giant’s moon had been that of a living thing running for its life. The way the swarm moved reminded him of flocks of birds he’d seen on videos of Earth. Granted, he hadn’t inspected one up close, but he found it extremely difficult to reconcile what he had seen to the idea of them not being alive and intelligent.
“I guess the real prison was the planet itself.”
“Or maybe the whole system.”
“It still makes no sense,” Tristan said. “We broke through the defenses really easily. A fighter wing and a couple of marine platoons. That doesn’t sound like the kind of security you want around the shield meant to contain a planet full of those… things. Hell, how long do you think a rescue crew would have taken to break them out? You saw what they did to the Dart and the Bard, even with fighter screens.”
“You’re right. But what other explanation is there?”
Melina spoke up. “Maybe all the wings were on the inside of the shield and there was no one left to spring them. Hell, that’s what I would have wanted if I’d been the one to capture them.”
This set off another round of argument. “But how does one even capture a fighter drone?”
“And why?”
It went on, like all marine bull sessions when no one was shooting at them, for quite a while. No one was any wiser at the end of it.
***
“Sun’s going down,” Ian said. He and Melina had tried to make themselves comfortable in the flyer. The seats weren’t fully reclinable, but even reclining in the tight space and sub-optimal angle was better than trying to stand around and do things in the high gravity.
“I can see that,” Melina replied. “The question is, what is night like on this place? All I really know is that it lasts about sixteen hours.”
“To be honest, unless that swarm comes back, I think the marines should be able to deal with whatever the planet throws at us. We still haven’t seen any signs of animal life, much less anything that might pose a threat to modern weaponry.”
“I’m not particularly concerned about animals. Hell, I wish there were animals here. It might give us some hope of finding food.” She ignored the rumbling of her stomach. They had some energy bars in the flyer’s stores, but not enough to keep them going for long, and certainly not enough to share with the other people stranded on the surface.
Ian looked into her eyes. “You think we’re gonna make it?”
“I’ve known I wasn’t going to make it since before I boarded the Ismala,” she replied.
“Then why come? Why throw your life away?”
She sighed. “I know you didn’t volunteer, so I guess you probably won’t understand, but the truth is that I never thought of it as throwing my life away. I believe that what we came here to do is meaningful, and that we’re the only chance that a lot of people had.”
“But how can you think that way? In a war where hundreds of years might pass between the time your orders are given and the time you actually carry them out, everything might have changed. The action might be meaningless.”
“You might be right, but those are the rules. We didn’t start this war. We don’t want to fight it, and I’m pretty sure we don’t actually understand it. What motivates a blob, or a Brillan? Even the Uploaders? What makes them want to force every other human in the galaxy to join their way of life? All you can do in that situation is take the course that seems best.”
“I’m just saying that you might not choose a suicide mission in those circumstances. Especially if that mission is just a delaying action that might be moot by the time you actually get to wherever it is that you’re supposed to be fighting it. It seems like such a waste.”
She sighed and a single tear rolled down her cheek, catching Ian completely by surprise. He continued hastily. “Um, of course you’re probably right. Ever since I woke up here, everyone around us has let me know what an asshole I am for not having volunteered. Maybe they’re right.”
Melina wiped her eyes and gave him a wan smile. “You’re sweet, but I’m not crying because of what you said. It’s because nothing makes sense. Where are the blobs? Where is the fleet we’re supposed to be fighting. We know blob weapons, we know their tactics. Nothing we found here looks like their stuff.”
“Maybe they lost this system in the time it took us to get here. When their fleet arrives, we’ll have the war we were expecting. Plus all this other stuff.”
“Somehow, I don’t think so. I think we’re missing something.”
“What can we be missing? Do you think the blobs turned their fleet around mid-transit? Maybe they got word of what was happening here and decided to abandon the system?”
“Well, that might explain it.”
He could see that Melina wasn’t convinced. “But you don’t think so.”
“No. Not really. It’s just too much. This planet, this whole system, is a prison system. Why would anyone take it from the blobs just to turn it into a jail? And the timeline? Four hundred years? It seems to me that this place has been here longer than that. A few centuries, at least. Look at this floor. Nearly indestructible, but the grass is getting through. I think there’s something else going on.”
“But what?”
She shrugged, and suddenly broke down completely as sobs racked her frame. “I didn’t think I’d live this long. If I’d known we might make it through, I probably would have thrown myself out the nearest airlock when I woke up.”
He had no idea what she was talking about. He hesitantly put a hand on her arm. “Look, I know it looks bad, but we’ll make i
t.”
“I don’t particularly want to make it. I wish the air defenses around that planet had put up more of a fight, or that I hadn’t been grounded. I’m pretty sure I could have taken a few of those wing things with me before they got me. They fly pretty well, but still think I could have shot some down.”
“Don’t talk that way. Why would you want to die?”
“Because I’m sick of it all. I’ve been at war since I was a kid. I watched my parents die, and I thought my world would end. But then I became a pilot. A good pilot, and I kept many, many people alive so they could keep running from the blobs. I don’t think I missed a single major posting during the Long Retreat.
“I’ve fought them all. The blobs. The Brillans. Hell, I even caught an Uploader spy flyer once and blew it to hell.”
Ian grunted. Being discovered by a fighter was every Recon officer’s worst nightmare. Normally, spy ships were fast and well-endowed with sensor tech, but sadly lacking in the weapons department. Trying to outrun missiles and projectile weapons was a sucker’s bet.
“But even though I always went nose-first into the battle, even though I led my squadrons from the front every single time, I’ve never suffered so much as a bruise in battle. I’ve watched my wing mates get burned to atoms, torn to shreds, and thrown out of their ships to die in vacuum, but I’ve never gotten hurt.”
“Did you want to?”
“I never wanted to get hurt but, deep down inside, I think I’ve always wanted to die. It was the only way I could think of to make the war end. I couldn’t run from it. I certainly couldn’t end it. Even if I took a slow ship away or landed on one of the new colony worlds and lived out my entire life in peace, I would always know that there was fighting going on somewhere. Fighting for the lives of people being evacuated somewhere, or to try to keep a besieged colony alive just a few more weeks, praying for reinforcements to arrive. And I’d know that the units doing the fighting could always use one more good pilot. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.”
“But dying? Life has so many possibilities.”
Incursion: Shock Marines Page 15