Chamberlain's Folly (The Terra Nova Chronicles)

by Robert Dean Hall

  There was still a needle of black smoke rising up from the city near the northwest gate even though the explosion happened almost four hours ago. Black Bear and November scanned the recorded video for any clues to what may have exploded. They looked at the area directly below the smoke from different angles and could not make out any damage to the city whatsoever.

  On the live feed from the drone they saw natives spread out all over the city maintaining the machinery. There were now hundreds of armed natives in military uniforms along the walls and in the towers.

  “Bravo. Get that drone as close to the city as you can without attracting their attention,” Black Bear said.

  Bravo dropped the nearly silent drone to less than five hundred meters above the city but kept it within the glare of the yellow sun, which was nearly overhead. He pointed the camera directly at the area around the northwestern city gate and zoomed in to full magnification.

  “There’s not a bit of damage to anything near where that smoke is coming from, Colonel,” November said.

  Black Bear shrugged.

  “We must be missing something,” he replied. “That fireball came from somewhere. Are we sure we are looking at the same coordinates where God’s Eye saw the smoke rising? Maybe we’re looking in the wrong place?”

  “With all due respect, Colonel,” Bravo said. “I have the coordinates that God’s Eye sent us for the smoke plume and I’m pointing the drone’s camera directly at them.”

  “The coordinates must be incorrect,” Black Bear snapped. “They couldn’t have cleaned up the damage from an explosion that large in less than five hours, no matter how many of them are down there. Sweep in circles. Use the God’s Eye coordinates as a center and go slow. I want to study every square millimeter of that part of the city until we find what the Hell blew up.”

  Bravo took the drone out of its position in the glare of the sun and moved it to a location where it could get a closer look at the area around the northwest gate. Black Bear watched the video from his command console.

  On the third sweep of the area, Black Bear caught something he hadn’t noticed before. A large dark cylindrical shape was emerging from the shadows of the tower as the sun moved toward its highest point in the sky.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Black Bear said.

  “I see it too,” November said.

  There was no mistaking the last streamers of black smoke rising into the sky came from that cylinder.

  “Is it a fuel tank,” Bravo asked. “That would explain the fireball.”

  “No, Lieutenant,” Black Bear replied. “A fireball as big as the one we saw should have not only taken out the tank, but everything else within five-hundred meters.”

  Black Bear thought about it some more. He was almost certain now what had really transpired that day, but waited to see what November said before he spoke again.

  “Is it a chimney of some sort,” November asked. “Did the explosion take place underground?”

  “I don’t see any cracks in the ground or any of the above-ground structures,” Black Bear said. “It would’ve had to be deep underground. We should have felt some shaking.”

  “Come to think of it, Colonel,” November replied. “Things were pretty wild earlier. I can’t swear I remember any kind of shock wave at all. And that was a huge fireball.”

  Black Bear looked at her and smiled.

  November looked back. Her puzzled expression intensified as the pieces fell into place.

  “Pyrotechnics,” she asked.

  Black Bear nodded. “It has to be,” he said.

  “But why, Colonel,” November asked.

  “Nothing that happened today makes complete sense by itself,” Black Bear explained. “The wide-open city, the ease at which Alpha’s team got in or moved around, the absence of guards on the walls or in the towers, the way the natives seemed to be attracting attention to that part of the city.”

  November listened, but hadn’t quite caught on.

  “Add the shelling to chase us out of there after the fireball,” Black Bear said.

  “We stopped getting transmissions once the explosion happened,” Bravo said. “That had to be what took the team out. How did the hostiles get them into that tank or whatever it is? And why go to all that trouble to blow up six commandos after allowing them free reign of the whole city for most of the day?”

  “Somebody knew that Alpha was on chatter and talking to us,” Black Bear explained. “The natives led the team to a specific place and then created a distraction for some reason. If my suspicions are correct, the explosion had nothing directly to do with the disappearance of the team.”

  Black Bear grinned.

  “November, replay the audio to be sure the teams headsets went dead after the explosion,” he commanded. “It was damned noisy in the shuttle directly afterward. We might find some sort of noise on the line after the fireball we didn’t catch before.”

  “What killed them, then, Colonel,” November asked.

  “You mean, if they are actually dead,” Black Bear replied.

  “I still don’t quite understand, Colonel,” Bravo said.

  “I have a feeling in my gut, that Alpha and his team are alive,” Black Bear said. “I think they were captured and everything that went on later was misdirection.”

  November scratched her head.

  “Colonel,” she said. “I can buy that the natives might have staged the explosion to make us believe the team was dead. And, I can understand they wouldn’t have wanted us to get a closer look at the city before pulling out, so they shelled the shuttle. But, why the nuke? That seems too big to be part of a misdirection. I mean, what if we had decided to send one back?”

  “I can’t answer that question at the moment, Major,” Black Bear told her. “There is too much we don’t understand about the enemy to clearly discern his motivations. All we can do for the moment is guess at what would make us do the same things.”

  “Were they maybe testing our offensive capabilities,” November asked. “Maybe they fired the missile to see if we would fire one back?”

  “The whole idea of nuclear weapons is deterrence,” Black Bear answered. “You detonate test devices ‘secretly’ in places where your enemy can gauge the size and decide for himself if he wants to piss you off enough to use one. You don’t send a nuke directly at a target without knowing in advance if the other guy is packing. And you certainly don’t send one in, get through the other guy’s defenses and change your mind at the last second.”

  “Were they testing our defensive capacities then,” November inquired. “They got through our anti-missiles with no difficulty by using that incendiary chaff.”

  “Again,” Black Bear asked. “Why telegraph your capability to get a missile through your enemy’s defenses? That gives him the chance to develop countermeasures for the next exchange.”

  Without explanation, Bravo suddenly lost all contact with the drone. All of the different telemetry indicators on the flight yoke started to flash red as he did his best to regain control.

  “It’s gone, Sir,” he said to Black Bear. “If Air Traffic Control took it back from us, we’d still be getting some systems information.”

  “Did we fly it into something, Lieutenant,” Black Bear asked.

  “No Sir,” Bravo answered. “I had a clear navcam view all the time. We were above all obstructions.”

  Before Black Bear could offer any other possibilities to consider, red lights flashed all over the interior of the shuttle and claxons blared. Instinctively, Bravo jumped up from the drone’s flight station and into the pilot’s chair.

  “We’ve got incoming,” he yelled to the other two. He took a quick look at the navigational feed and screamed, “We have four bogeys. Dead ahead.”

  Black Bear watched tracers from the automated turret stream out toward the horizon in front of the shuttle. There was a bright flash as one of the tracers connected with a target.

  “Whatever that hit was damn
ed big,” Black Bear shouted. “Get us in the air now, Bravo. Don’t wait for November and me to strap in. We’ll hold on to something.”

  November took control of the weapons console and tried to get a lock on the incoming. The weapons system refused to allow her to fire air-to-air ordnance until the shuttle was off the ground and had line of sight contact. The enemy missiles were coming in low and fast.

  “Terrain-following,” November yelled. “Get us as far above them as you can, Bravo. Make it fast.”

  November barely got a lock on the closest target before Bravo tilted the nose of the shuttle sixty degrees above horizon and gave the main engines full power. She fired every air-to-air missile she had and hoped she hit something.

  The sudden thrust from the main engines pinned everyone to their chairs. November flipped down her visor and watched via her heads up display as the ordnance she unleashed on the incoming marks closed in.

  The shuttle was managing to get above the incoming but it was still the largest target in the area. One of the defensive missiles that November fired took out its target and the others distracted the remaining marks just long enough for the shuttle to slip above them.

  There were three explosions in rapid succession below the shuttle that shook the craft violently and put stress cracks in every piece of glass that was mounted to its space frame.

  Bravo fought to keep the shuttle under control. It was starting to bank right and had stopped climbing. He pulled the stick left to counter the banking and keep the shuttle level. The controls responded, albeit sluggishly. There were no provisions for ejection from the shuttle. If Bravo couldn’t keep the craft in the air, they would have to ride it to the surface.

  “Hold on,” Bravo yelled. “We lost our main engines. I still have the VTL thrusters and the emergency stabilizers. I can keep us right-side-up, but we’re going in hot.”

  “Can I help,” November asked.

  “Nothing to do,” Bravo answered. “We’re ballistic. Finish buckling in and brace for impact.”

  Bravo left the emergency stabilizers on full auto to help keep the shuttle upright while he tried to figure out how to cushion the landing enough for the trio to walk away. He applied full power to his vertical takeoff and landing thrusters and instinctively pulled the joystick back, putting the front thrusters at an attitude where they would have sent the shuttle careening in reverse, had it been only a few meters off the ground and hovering.

  The shuttle was much farther up and moving forward, so the thrusters only had the effect of raising the nose. Just as Bravo had hoped, the stabilizers countered the landing thrusters to keep the nose just barely above horizontal.

  “What are you doing,” Black Bear asked. “If you put us into a stall, the stabilizers will never be able to correct for that.” He began to regret terribly his order to have the shuttle fully fueled before the mission.

  “I’m trying to do some atmospheric braking,” Bravo yelled. “If we can drop our rate of descent far enough, the VTL thrusters might cushion the impact and keep us from breaking our backs when we hit. Brace for impact. In five… four… three….”

  When they hit the desert floor, all the glass that was cracked by the detonation of the air-to-air missiles broke into shards that flew around the cabin of the shuttle. Black Bear was directly behind Bravo and felt some of the shards bouncing off his helmet.

  He held on tight as he felt his back and buttocks leave his seat. His chest, shoulders and crotch strained painfully against the five-point harness that was riveted tightly to the space frame. In a matter of a couple of seconds, he felt himself crashing back down into the seat as the shuttle took a second bounce.

  Sand and salt poured into the cabin as the shuttle once more became airborne. Black Bear couldn’t see for the cloud of sand. He felt himself tumbling forward even though he was still connected to the seat and space frame of the shuttle. Black Bear’s head felt as if it were going to explode and force his eyes out of their sockets.

  Then, as the shuttle stopped bouncing and started to tumble, Black Bear felt weightless. The shards of glass and debris he could see flying around through the dusty air inside the shuttle seemed to be moving in slow motion. He closed his eyes and grabbed his seat to keep his arms from flailing about. The shuttle continued tumbling end over end for another few hundred meters. By the time it came to rest on its top, Black Bear was unconscious.

  Chapter 18

  Black Bear was startled by the sensation of something cold and wet on his face. November was bent over him, swabbing it with a wet scrap of cloth.

  “Sorry Colonel, Sir,” she said. “It’s only water. I couldn’t find the first aid kit. Bravo is still looking for it. We left a trail of scrap metal a kilometer long. Most of it is burning. I guess we were lucky. The crew compartment separated from the propulsion unit and the fuel tanks during the initial impact.”

  “Are you two alright,” Black Bear asked her.

  “Bravo and I both caught shards from the canopy,” she replied. “It isn’t anything that anti-septic and some butterfly bandages can’t take care of until they can stitch us up back at base.”

  Bravo suddenly appeared at an opening in the wreckage.

  “I found the first-aid kit and the ration locker,” he said. There was a smug expression of self-satisfaction on his face. “At least we’ll have protein bars to munch on while we wait for the rescue mission to get here.”

  He opened up the ration locker and looked inside.

  “Chocolate-almond, dated twenty-one fifty-six,” he exclaimed. “Hot damn it.”

  Black Bear sat up. He grabbed onto the closest structural member he could reach, and tried to pull himself to a standing position. He felt a number of sharp pains run all through his ribcage. He got dizzy and sat back down.

  “You should take it easy for now, Colonel,” November told him. “We hit the ground hard. None of us really knows how badly we’re hurt.”

  “I’m pretty sure I broke a few ribs against the safety harness,” Black Bear said. He tried to get a good view of their surroundings.

  “Do we have any idea how far we are from the city,” he asked. “We took off straight for it when those missiles came at us.”

  “The rescue squad homed in on my locator signal, but didn’t give me the coordinates, Colonel,” Bravo said, while chewing on his protein bar. “I’d be willing to wager we are within five klicks, though.”

  Black Bear looked at Bravo.

  “Do you still have the emergency locator,” he asked.

  “Yes, Colonel, I do,” Bravo replied.

  “Give it to me,” Black Bear demanded. “I need to tell our rescuers I doubt the natives will allow them to get in and out of here without a fight.”

  “I apprised them of the situation, Sir,” Bravo answered. “General Yuen is sending in a full company. He told us to sit tight. I’m guessing he doesn’t want us to be captured.”

  “He doesn’t want any of our technology to fall into enemy hands either,” Black Bear replied. “I don’t think the natives will be coming out here after us, though. I believe they already have some prisoners. They weren’t trying to capture us. They wanted to knock us out of the sky.”

  “If the enemy does have them, Colonel,” November asked. “Do you think they will hurt them?”

  “I think they are safe for now,” Black Bear told her. “But, if the natives captured them to gain intelligence, they won’t be for long. We don’t know enough about the city to go in and find them, so they are on their own.”

  Black Bear then motioned for Bravo to give him the locator.

  “I need to tell those guys the natives don’t want us anywhere near that city,” he said. “If they fly this close, they’re going to pick up some fire.”

  Black Bear opened a channel on the locator. One of the incoming shuttles answered his hail.

  “You guys can’t come waltzing in here with that much firepower and not piss the natives off,” Black Bear admonished the pilot who answe
red his call. “Didn’t you see what the Hell they did to us?”

  “With all due respect, Colonel,” the feline major in command of the rescue mission replied. “General Yuen told me not to come back without you, Sir, and I sure as Hell don’t want to disappoint him. I have six gunships closing on your location. We’ve been broadcasting in the open that this is a rescue mission and we only want to get you folks out of there. We also moved the battle cruiser into low orbit and it will be over top of us when we get there.”

  Not long after Black Bear’s call the rescue team set down in the middle of the debris field. Three fully armed Swifts circled while two more Swifts and a much larger drop shuttle landed. Crews emerged from both Swifts and the larger shuttle to pick up the stranded team and collect any of the debris that could provide usable intelligence to the Terra Novans.

  As soon as Black Bear could get aboard one of the Swifts and get a secure channel back to New Phoenix, he called in and asked for General Yuen.

  “General,” he said. “I need to talk to you about this. I believe I’ve figured out what the natives might be playing at.”

  Yuen cautioned Black Bear about saying too much, even over a secure channel.

  “Save it until you get back here, Billy,” he said. “And get some rest. You’ve taken a lot of fire, today.”

  ****

  Three hours later, a weary Colonel Black Bear was sitting on an exam table in the infirmary. A doctor had taped up Black Bear’s broken ribs and was stitching up some of the deep lacerations he had in various places.

  General Yuen came bursting through the door.

  “So, Billy,” he asked loudly, and with a smirk. “Do you still think the natives want to talk?”

  Black Bear grabbed the arm of the doctor who was stitching him up and moved it to the side so he could stand. He towered over Yuen and stood looking down at him.

  “With all due respect, General,” he said, jaw clenched tight. “I am really not in the mood.”

  Yuen smiled back at him.

  “I would imagine you aren’t,” he said, seemingly oblivious to the fact he had angered Black Bear. “Did you get any sleep on the shuttle ride back in?”