Manxome Foe

by John Ringo

  "Uh, no sir, the comet water extraction didn't fall under astrogation or propulsion or fighting the Dreen so I, uh, delegated it, sir," Weaver said sheepishly.

  "Understood. To whom was it delegated?"

  "Tchar."

  "Tchar," the CO said, nodding. Calmly. "Tchar. Right. We'll discuss that decision of yours later, Astro. Right now, do you have any suggestions for getting my elevator unstuck?"

  "I'm thinking on it, sir. Maybe Tchar has something in his junk pile. I'd better get down there sir."

  "Sir," the COB said, sticking his head in the wardroom. "This reminds me of a boat I was on a few years ago—"

  "COB, much as I enjoy your reminiscences—" the CO said tightly.

  "Yes, sir," the COB interrupted. "I know you enjoy them all, sir. But there's a point to this one, sir. Are you willing to gain the benefit of my nearly thirty years in this country's Navy, sir? Or are you going to tell your senior enlisted man to mind his own business, sir?"

  Spectre opened his mouth, then shut it.

  "Go ahead, COB."

  "The point, sir, is that we were in the arctic," the COB continued. "Machinist Mate Gants happened to be on the same cruise. He wasn't a mate back then and I wasn't COB but we were on the same boat, Lord help me. Anyway, he used a welder to melt a statue of a naked woman out of some glacier ice. See, we did a crack through on the ice and . . ."

  "Weaver?"

  "Great idea, COB," Weaver said. He hit the com keys on his console. "Eng? I need Machinist Mate Gants on the double."

  "Yeah, I did this once for a Christmas Party a few years ago when we were poking up through the ice in the Arctic. We were camping up there for Christmas with these SEALS that were waiting on a damned Chinese polar orbiting satellite to crash . . . uh, forget I said that part . . . so I decided to lighten the mood." Gants tossed several extra long welding rods, a roll of space tape, and a few tungsten rods into a cart alongside the portable welding generator and welder transformer. "We'd better hurry though."

  "How we getting this down to them?" Miriam asked.

  "Somebody's gotta carry it to 'em out the forward or top airlock or maybe out one of the torp tubes," Gants said. "I saw Deep Impact and I have no desire to be walking on a damned comet in the middle of freakin' space."

  "Uh, yeah." Miriam tried not to grin. The movie had been so incorrect in the nature of comets it was a catastrophe in and of itself. But she decided not to say anything. Besides, the voice in her head was telling her something interesting about ". . . the entropy due to quantum fluctuations around the event horizon being proportional to the surface area of the artificial singularity . . ." So she was only half listening to Gants. Being an interpreter for years had trained her to half listen to multiple conversations at once. Maybe that is why the voice likes me?

  » » »

  "Well, Chief, you really managed to grapp this one up, huh? No comments about whose idea this was." Weaver was chagrined at himself, not the crew.

  "Not gonna say a word about it, sir," Miller said with a snort.

  "Two-Gun, start setting this up. Get me the welding transformer plugged into the generator and get it right here by this elevator strut. The welder only has about eight feet of cable."

  "Yes sir! Himes, Lurch give me a hand." Two-Gun shot another harpoon into the comet just forward of the elevator and winched himself to the welder that the commander had brought them. Himes and Lurch followed suit.

  "Now I just stretch this tungsten rod between these two welder clips and that should do it. I see the other rods and space tape now." He laid the other two welding rods across the back of the insulated parts of the welder clips and then space taped them to each clip so he could use the welding rods as a handle. Those damned machinists in engineering were nothing if not clever.

  "Ready over there Two-Gun?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Turn me on."

  "On, sir."

  "Wheeee!" Weaver could see the tungsten rod glowing red hot. He set to work on the first ice sculpture in space, on a comet, in orbit around a distant star. Say what you wanted to about the casualty rates, but sometimes Weaver felt he had the best job in the galaxy. He felt like the heroes in those science fiction books he grew up reading. The only things missing were scantily clad super vixen heroines.

  "So the t/psi interacts with the psi muon density modularity vector . . ." Miriam muttered. "I can see that . . ."

  "Try it now, Mike," Weaver told Gants over the com.

  "Yes, sir," Gants depressed the elevator controls and sluggishly the hydraulics pulled the box filled with about twenty-five tons of ice free from the comet.

  "Hot damn!"

  "The elevator is here, sir." Gants replied. "It'll, uh, take us a few minutes to unload it."

  "Copy that."

  Gants and several of the submarine's tech crew set to work emplacing the smaller chipper and melter system in the elevator and connecting it to the flex hose that ran down the corridor around two corners and up one deck to the water reservoir inlet near what used to be ballast tanks. In space they were water reservoirs.

  The smaller chipper made quick work of the ice, and the fact that it was about sixty-eight degrees in the ship helped also. The ice melted as it was chipped and was sucked away through the flex hose.

  "How we doing, XO?" the CO asked.

  "Uhm . . . About that bet with Commander Weaver, sir?"

  "Tell me."

  "It's taking four minutes to unload the elevator and drop it back to the surface. It takes about two minutes to refill it and unstick it. Total time, six minutes."

  "Not bad," the CO said, nodding. "Not bad!"

  "Yes, sir," the XO said. "The interior volume of the elevator is thirty-six cubic meters. We need twenty-six thousand cubic meters of water. Actually, that's just to fill the reserve tanks. It doesn't take into account the amount of O2 we need to crack out of it."

  "Oh," the CO said. "Timeframe?"

  "Seventy-two hours just to fill the reserve tanks," the XO said. "Another thirty-four to create enough water to refill the O2 tanks. Actually, that's not exactly right, since we're using it even as we're gathering it. Total estimated time? One hundred and twenty hours to have everything topped off."

  "We don't have five days, XO," the CO said. "We're on a rescue mission."

  "Agreed, sir," Coldsmith said. "Would you care to venture an estimate on how long it will take to refill at a Jovian with the new systems?"

  "Go."

  "Twenty-six hours, topped off."

  "Damn."

  "Suspend operations," Commander Coldsmith said.

  "Why?" Weaver replied.

  "Commander, I know you haven't been an officer for as long as your rank might suggest, but in the Navy when you're given an order . . ."

  "Sorry, XO," Weaver said. "I meant to say 'aye, aye, sir.' "

  "There's good news, though," the XO replied. "The CO owes you a dollar."

  "Damn," Spectre said, looking at the readings. Entry to the system and approach to the Jovian had taken less than an hour. Set up had taken less than fifteen minutes with the installed system. He'd gone off-watch, done some paperwork and come back to find the tanks almost filled, O2 and H2O.

  "Good job, Commander. You were r . . . You were ri . . . Damnit, here's your dollar!"

  "I won't say I told you so, sir," Weaver replied, taking the dollar primly. "I'm too tired and much too big of a man to say anything like—"

  "Thin ice, Astro," the CO said. "Thin ice."

  "Yes, sir. And I'm sure no pun was intended."

  12

  "Set Condition One! Prepare for HD 36951 system entry!"

  "Thank God," First Sergeant Powell muttered. "Please let there be something to fight!"

  "Tactical, Conn," Spectre said, watching the forward view. The approaching planet looked somewhat like Mars, one of the standard "looks" he'd seen at least a hundred times on the previous mission. But on this one there was a gate. And at least at one time there had been
enemies. "Anything?"

  "Negative, Conn," the TACO replied. "No emissions beyond what we'd expect from the sun and the gate."

  "I'm getting the take, too," Weaver said. "All normal. No electronics from the planet. If there are any survivors who avoided the blast, they're keeping quiet."

  "Okay, let's take her down," Spectre said. "Land a klick from the edge of the blast area and send in the Marines. Make it so, XO."

  "Dust ball," Berg said as the team deployed out of the aliglass elevator. "We're going to have to go over the Wyverns when we get back and get every scrap of this dust out of the joints or it will wear like a bitch."

  "Make you an armorer for a couple of days . . ." Himes said.

  "I'm more worried about what we're going to find," Smith said as the elevator touched the red soil.

  The boat had landed on a broad plateau near the site of the gate. The blast effect area from the nuke was evident, a broad, shallow crater the size of a large factory. The Looking Glass was also visible, floating in the air above the center of the crater.

  The gate was located in a narrow valley between two plateaus, one the ship had landed on and the other occupied by ruins of the ancient civilization that had, presumably, emplaced the Looking Glass boson in the first place. The ruins were visible as well but they were so worn by time they looked barely different from their surroundings. The ruins had been surveyed, though, before the blast, and there were tunnels that could have sheltered survivors of the initial attack and the response. Checking them out was first priority.

  "The ship didn't see anything on the pass," Two-Gun replied, stepping out and moving forward as the elevator doors opened. "If there were major threats they'd have seen it. Just deploy and cover for the rest of the company. We're not going to be getting busy till we get down into the valley."

  As each team moved out of the elevator, Berg's moved forward, keeping the bombing site and the distant ruins in view. It took a while. Only three Wyverns would fit in the elevator, a fact that had been a problem more than once on the previous mission. It was simply a pain exiting the ship. Retreating into it was damned well nightmarish.

  Finally both of the platoons that were going on the mission were down and deployed. Berg anticipated the ping from his platoon leader and started picking a path down the slope to the valley. Where the gate had been was a glassy crater, pointless to examine not to mention still rather radioactive. But there might be indicators to either side. His platoon was detailed to take the north side in a sweep across the valley while Third swept to the south.

  The slope down was slight but tricky. The Wyverns always had a problem with rough ground, especially on the downslope. But Berg's team quickly reached the bottom and started to sweep across the valley as teams deployed to either side.

  "I'm glad we're in the middle and don't have the south side," Himes muttered. "I'm getting readings off that crater all the way over here."

  "Nothing that's going to hurt us," Berg said. "Less chatter, more looking."

  "And I think we've got something," Smith replied, pinging for a stop.

  "Is that something?" Berg asked, walking over and taking a look. The "something" was a narrow hole that appeared to have been punched into the red soil. "It could be sampling from the scientists."

  "What's up, Two-Gun?" Top asked, bounding over in his Wyvern. "A hole?"

  "It looks like it was pushed in, Top," Smith said. "Like a big . . . toothpick?"

  "Sir, I need a science team," the first sergeant said over the company freq. "Bio or Geo."

  Master Sergeant Max Guzik bounced over and looked at the hole.

  "It's not a standard auger hole," the geology specialist said. "And the edges are tapered, indicating that whatever made it was shoved into the ground under high pressure."

  "I've got another one over here," Lieutenant Monaghan said. "First Platoon, spread out. See how many of these we've got."

  Eventually sixteen separate holes in an oval pattern nearly a hundred meters across were found. By that time, Sergeant First Class Darren Hanel, the biology specialist, had taken samples from the first hole.

  "I'll say this," the sergeant first class said, straightening up. "Whatever it was was hot. Did you notice the sides were partially melted?"

  "Yeah," Master Sergeant Guzik said. "But it wasn't nuclear. No radiation readings. But I'm pretty sure the team that was here didn't make it."

  "Concur on that," Hanel said, putting the sample away. "I'll see what I can get off of it. Probably nothing. Anything that can punch a hole like that and melt the sides of the hole isn't going to spall off much material."

  "Pardon me," Lance Corporal Smith said. "Laser?"

  "You wouldn't have had that dug-up lip," the master sergeant replied. "And I don't see the hole being tapered. No, I think we're looking at some sort of landing jacks."

  Berg looked around at the flags marking the perimeter of the anomaly, then at the narrow hole and whistled.

  "Master Sergeant," he said, carefully, "if they're landing jacks, then whatever they were supporting was at least a hundred meters long and about forty wide."

  "And they're very narrow," Guzik growled. "Figured that one out, Two-Gun. But thanks for the input. We're looking at something that displaced over ten thousand tons, minimum, but which lands on sixteen toothpicks. Well, railroad spikes."

  "Why do I suddenly have the image of a giant spider in my head?" Smith muttered.

  "Why do I have the image of a Dreen warship that just looks sort of like a giant spider?" Himes replied. "Big bulbous body, sixteen spiderlike landing legs. And a whole passel of Dreen rhino-tanks, dog-demons, thorn-throwers . . ."

  "We get the point, Himes," Berg said. "Can it."

  "You brains get this sorted out?" First Sergeant Powell asked, bouncing over. He'd swept around the crater and gotten Third Platoon up to the ruins, searching for survivors.

  "I think we're looking at landing jacks, First Sergeant," Guzik said. "Just a guess. I'm not an alien tech specialist. But they're not probe holes. They taper, nothing appeared to be picked up, they're partially melted on the side . . . Sixteen narrow somethings which were intensively hot were shoved into the ground under enormous weight. That says landing jacks to me. I'd suggest getting Lieutenant Fey out here while we continue our sweep. And look for indications that something deployed from the ship. If there was a ship."

  "All teams," Lieutenant Monaghan said. "Up to the ruins. Keep an eye out for tracks or traces. The base is in our sector. Bravo, you've got point into the secondary base. Move it out."

  "Let's go," Berg said, gesturing to the hills above. "Vector right a bit. There's a path."

  The path had been heavily used but if any aliens had used it, it wasn't evident. The secondary base was reported to be partially built into one of the ruins, mostly underground. It wasn't visible from the approach path and when Berg's team neared it he slowed down.

  "Anybody got anything on sensors?" he asked.

  "Negative," Himes reported. "There should be at least some electrical secondaries from equipment. But I'm getting nada."

  "Ditto," Smith said.

  "Ears," Berg said, cranking up the gain on his external audio systems. He could hear the teams behind him scrabbling up the hill but that was about it. He changed frequencies.

  "Top, we're trying to do an audio—"

  "All teams, freeze," the first sergeant said before he even finished.

  With the sounds of the teams gone all there was was a light whistling from the thin atmosphere's wind on the rocks.

  "Negative on sound or emissions at the site," Berg said.

  "Teams, continue mission. Two-Gun, check it out."

  Berg tracked his gun back and forth and then started forward.

  "Slow and careful," he said over the team freq.

  Cresting the edge of the ridgeline they could see the opening to the base. It had been sealed with heavy sheet plastic with plastic reinforcing. The sheet plastic was torn, the reinforcing had bee
n ripped out of the tunnel and part of the opening was fallen in.

  "I think somebody tore that up," Himes said.

  "Possibly," Berg said. "Or a one megaton nuclear blast could have done it."

  "Point."

  "Lieutenant Monaghan, containment on the base has been breached," Berg reported. "It's still unclear if it was from hostile action or the nuke. Continuing."

  "Roger," Lieutenant Monaghan replied. "Watch your ass, Two-Gun."

  "Whoa," Himes said. "Got something again. These ain't human tracks."

  Berg panned a camera around to see what Himes was looking at and nodded, his machine gun panning up and down.

  "Looks like claw marks," Berg said, hitting a control. "Sir, sending video. There appear to be claw tracks."

  "Dreen," Miller said from in the conn.

  "Oh, yeah," Weaver replied. "Shit."

  "Captain Zanella, this is the CO," Spectre said over the radio. "Those tracks have been identified as Dreen. Proceed with caution. I'm taking the ship up to orbit. I'm not going to get jumped on the ground by a Dreen warship."

  "Understood, sir."

  "Sir, permission to deploy before we take off," Weaver said.

  "Why?" Spectre snapped.

  "Because I think I've figured out a way to communicate with Earth, sir," Weaver said. "I'll need about twenty minutes to set it up. And I'll need a commo tech."

  Specter considered that for a moment, then nodded.

  "We'll scramble for altitude while you get ready," the CO said. "When you're ready, we'll drop you off."

  "Agreed, sir," Bill said, standing up. "Permission to go get ready."

  "Go. You too, Chief Miller."

  "What are you thinking?" Miller asked.

  "I'm hoping is more like it," Bill replied. "I'm hoping that they've got some smart people monitoring the dangerous gates."

  "All teams. The ship is heading for orbit in case we need firepower. Be aware that First Platoon has found definite signs of Dreen presence. They're probably gone, but remain fully alert."

  "Two-Gun."