by Rick Partlow
The port was a sprawling, spread-out facility, with three separate sections clustered around the blockish control center. The large, paved landing pad was built for the use of orbital shuttles. The one that the O'Keefe party had arrived on was still sitting on the plastcrete, seemingly intact. Beside it was something big and white that had to be over fifty meters tall and more than half as wide. Trang assumed it to be a heavy-lift shuttle of some kind, although he had never seen its like before. An onion-shaped craft, it rested on nearly two dozen landing struts mounted around a curved heat shield, the cant of the numerous thrust nozzles ringing the ablative estrutcheon indicating that the ship took off and landed vertically.
The second element of the port was the electromagnetic levitation cargo train rail that ran in a loop around the landing pad to the keystone of Aphrodite's space transportation system: the laser-launch platform. Fed by underground cables from the fusion plant outlying Kennedy, the huge free-electron laser was built mostly underground, its beam emitter emplaced at the center of a broad, ceramic platform. A conveyer track ran up to the platform from the maglev train's loading dock, allowing iridium and uranium from the mines to the southeast and crude oil from the wells deep in the Wastes to be shipped in simple, easily-replaceable laser-launch capsules, wheeled directly onto the platform and launched into orbit for the waiting cargo ships.
That was the way it had worked for the Republic's transportation multicorps prior to the invasion, and, to Trang's and Vinnie's surprise, the system still seemed to be in motion. In the hour they had been observing from their vantage point nearly two kilometers away, the maglev trains had been running nonstop, disgorging one bulbous laser-launch pod after another before heading back to the mines or the wells. Even as they watched, one of the rough metal pods rode up the track and settled in on the beam emitter. Intake fans on a skirt around the bell-shaped ignition chamber at the capsule's base whirred noisily, sucking in air for a few seconds before the launch laser fired.
The laser was infrared, its beam invisible to the human eye, but Trang and Vinnie could see the sparking ionization of the atmosphere in a glowing line beneath the launch pod as it rose slowly off the platform. The high-energy pulses superheated the air sucked into the capsule's ignition chamber and propelled the ten-ton vehicle with ever-increasing speed until it was hurtling skyward nearly faster than the eye could follow.
Trang could almost believe that things were back to normal---except for the dozens of Invader troops guarding the port facilities and the four Hopper battle machines patrolling the perimeter. Other Invader troops drove Port Authority loading equipment, ferrying what looked like electronics and computer equipment on pallets from the maglev train dock, up a cargo ramp into the belly of the onion-shaped shuttle.
"They're looting the planet," the mercenary Captain declared, resisting a temptation to shake his head in amazement, knowing it would jog the ocular's picture. "They must be loading the ore and the oil onto their ships in orbit."
"Jeez," Vinnie snorted, sitting back on his haunches. "You mean this whole thing's been just one, big armed robbery?"
"Apparently." Trang pulled the Marine helmet off, deciding that he---and its camera---had seen enough. He turned to the Sergeant, shrugging expressively. "Although I must confess it makes little sense to me, either. I think, however, that we should return and report this."
"Lieutenant Stark wanted us to scout out Kennedy," Vinnie reminded him, unscrewing the cap from his canteen and taking a long swig.
"We know enough already," Trang argued. "We can't take the risk of getting captured in the city and losing this footage. I guarantee you, my friend," he said, smiling coldly at Mahoney, "your Lieutenant will want to see this."
Chapter Nine
"It's better to be a live jackal than a dead lion---for jackals, not men."---Sidney Hooks.
Shannon sat alone in the shelter's darkened control room in front of a small, flat-screen monitor, watching the playback of Captain Trang's surveillance recording for the twentieth time. Nothing had changed in the crystalline matrix: it still projected the same images she and the rest of the group had seen earlier that day, and they were still just as vexing.
"Why the hell," she asked herself out loud, "would a race that has star travel bother to invade a two-bit colony just to loot computers, fissionable ore and oil?"
"Is that really the question?" Shannon spun around in her seat at the unexpected voice and saw Nathan Tanaka stepping into the room, dressed more casually than she had seen him since they'd arrived onplanet: a plain, white T-shirt and loose, black pants.
"What?" She shook her head in confusion, disconcerted at his sudden appearance.
"Should you really be asking the why of it, Lieutenant?" he elaborated, sitting on the edge of the console, glancing down at the infrared images displayed there.
"Why not?" She shrugged. "Figuring out why they're here could help us figure out the best way to resist them."
"Undoubtedly," the bodyguard admitted. "But I propose to you that the question of why is not an answerable one at this point." He waved a hand expansively. "Perhaps they are exiles, on the run from some higher authority and desperate for resupply. Or maybe the abundance of resources we have found on our colonies is the exception rather than the rule, and they're green---or should I say blue," he amended, "with envy. We could debate different theories forever. Even if we were able to capture one of the individual troopers, I am not sure it would be helpful. They seem to me to be something on the order of a biological automaton, incapable of independent action."
"So what would you suggest we do, Mr. Tanaka?" She leaned back in her chair, folding her arms across her breasts.
"That is the question to ask, Lieutenant," he said, "though I am not the one to answer it. As the commanding officer, you must decide what we are to do."
"I guess," she sighed, "that's what I've been trying to avoid."
"I would suggest that what you have been trying to avoid is admitting to yourself that you already know what you must do, and that it may result in many or all of our deaths."
She glanced at him sharply, his angular face oddly half-lit by the glow of the monitor, his eyes lost in darkness. That was exactly her concern, and it was something of a shock to her that he had discerned it so easily.
"We have to attack the spaceport," she almost whispered. "We don't know why they want the supplies, but we know they want them, and we know they're the enemy. We have to deny it to them."
"That is the decision of a leader," Tanaka assured her, putting a hand on her arm. It was a simple gesture, without intention, but the warmth of his fingers seemed electric against the skin of her arm and she pulled away instinctively.
Tanaka withdrew his hand, his eyes showing an unaccustomed confusion. Shannon shook the feeling off, rising from her seat abruptly.
"I'd better get some sleep." She hit the control to shut off the screen, and the lack of its light plunged the room into darkness, only the faint glow of the ghostlights on the baseboards allowing them to see at all. Curiously, though the bodyguard hadn't moved, he seemed closer somehow in the darkness. "I'll brief everyone in the morning," she promised, moving away from him, back toward the hallway to the sleeping quarters. Halfway there, she hesitated and eyed him curiously. "How did you know I'd be in here?"
"It is where I would have been," he answered simply. A smile stretched across her face, and she tried to fight back a blush.
"Good night, Mr. Tanaka," she said. "And thanks."
She moved down the hallway without waiting for a reply, quickly out of sight around the corner. Tanaka's eyes followed her, staring at the empty corridor long after she'd gone. Then, tentatively and carefully, his lip twitched upward into a smile. He allowed himself to savor the unfamiliar expression, and the unfamiliar emotion that accompanied it, for a moment before shaking away the feeling and stepping purposefully out of the room.
***
"Who knows laser-launch systems?" Shannon Stark asked, s
canning the faces of the group collected around the frozen monitor image of the spaceport.
"What about them?" Gunny Lambert interjected from his perch on the arm of the couch. "I mean, I guess I know the newsnet spiel: the laser heats the air in the capsule's ignition chamber and propels it into orbit."
"Actually," Tom Crossman corrected him, surprising Shannon, "the air that the launch capsule sucks in only gets it to the upper atmosphere; it has to carry a small fuel supply to reach orbit."
"I'm talking about operations," Stark clarified. "We need to find a way to shut it down, permanently, and hopefully destroy the other port facilities in the process. Any ideas on what we should target?"
"We could hit a launch capsule at take-off," Vinnie offered. "Knock out the ignition chamber and the debris might smash the laser's optics."
Tom shook his head. "They're fail-safed: all the fragile shit's underground."
Shannon cocked an eyebrow at Crossman. "You seem to be the resident expert. Tell us what you know."
"Well," the technician said, "my dad was an engineer---he helped build the system on Mars colony. I'm no expert, but I still remember a lot of the stuff he told me." He levered himself off the couch and went up to the monitor screen and poked a finger at the image of the launch platform. "Like I said, all the laser's focussing equipment's down below, protected by a good ten meters of dirt and rock. Power feed's down there, too, probably."
"Couldn't we pop a missile down the emitter?" PFC Bobby Comstock, the APC driver, wanted to know. "That'd take out the mirrors and power, wouldn't it?"
Crossman rolled his eyes. "Earth to Jarhead---didn't we just track that target? All that shit is shielded. Only thing a missile down the spout would hit is half-meter thick transplas ocular, and that's all they'd have to replace to get it running again."
"Well, if you're so Goddamned smart," Bobby drawled irritably, "then how th' hell do we knock it out?"
"There's maintenance tunnels running from the control center." Crossman bonked the screen with his knuckle over the blockish building at the center of the port. "We're gonna have to go through them to get access to the laser's guts: maybe a shoulder-fired missile or some kind of bomb we could rig up. That's the only way to take the thing out bad enough that they can't fix it."
"And that's what we'll have to do," Shannon said, "if we want to prevent them from looting this colony and using that laser to knock out any rescue ships that might come."
"That's an awful lot of open space," Lambert commented, wagging a finger at the port. "They've gotta have motion detectors and thermal scanners set up."
"You'll need a diversion of some kind," Trang noted. "Something to draw their forces away."
"We could take the scout," PFC Jimmy Jimenez, the thin, shaven-headed scout car driver suggested, "and go after that big rocket." He pointed at the onion-shaped heavy-lift launch vehicle over at the landing pad. "That'd get their attention, damn straight."
"You might not want all that attention, Jimmy," Bobby Comstock argued. "Armor on that speed buggy of yours won't stop no missile."
"The Private is correct." Tanaka spoke for the first time since the meeting had begun. "The scout can be only one part of the attack. Besides the penetration team, you will need a dismounted element utilizing shoulder-fired missiles to support the diversion."
"Oh, goody," Corporal Camellia Tinker muttered, chuckling humorlessly, "fun for everyone."
"So we'll need four groups," Shannon Stark mused, rubbing her chin. "Penetration, mounted diversion, dismounted support and an overwatch element to coordinate."
"Well, we know who's in the scout group," Comstock declared. "Who gets to go inside?"
"That's what we were trained for," Vinnie reminded Shannon.
"Vinnie's right," she said. "The four of us will take the laser."
"All due respect, ma'am," Lambert said, shaking his head, "you going in wouldn't be a good idea."
"He is correct," Tanaka agreed, his tone gently reproving. "You are the only officer: you must stay with the overwatch element and direct the other teams."
"All right, damn it." Shannon let out a sigh. "This commanding officer crap is getting old. If not me, then who? Three probably won't be enough---you'll need two to hold the control center and at least two to set the charges."
"How about you, Captain Trang?" Vinnie asked the mercenary officer. "You handled yourself pretty good out there." He extended the man a hand. "Wanna come along for the ride?"
"You patriotic types will get me killed yet," Trang moaned. But he took the hand. "I'm in," he told Shannon.
"We'll hang with you, Captain," one of the other two security people, a tall, lanky European whose name escaped Shannon declared. The other merc, a broad-shouldered Asian, nodded his agreement.
Trang shook his head. "I thank you for your loyalty, but your place is here, to ensure the safety of the governor." He glanced at Sigurdsen, who sat off to the side, a potted plant for most of the conversation. Actually, Shannon couldn't recall the big man having said more than two words since the night of their arrival, but the reference to him seemed to stir him from his self-imposed silence.
"Lieutenant," he spoke hesitantly, "are you certain this is the right thing to do? What if your ship is still out there? Shouldn't we wait till we're sure there's no other way?"
"They didn't reply to our transmission, Your Honor," she reminded him. "Even if they're out there, they couldn't approach till we took out the laser---otherwise, the Invaders could use it to knock out any attempt at a counterstrike.”
The Governor nodded slowly and reluctantly, still seemingly not quite convinced.
"All right." Shannon took a deep breath before continuing. "Gunny, I'll leave it to you to separate your people into three teams: the scout car assault group, an APC crew and a support team to dismount from the carrier and back up the diversion. Vinnie, you coordinate with the Gunny on coming up with the charges and timers."
"We can rig something up from rifle grenades," Mahoney stated, rising from his seat as the others began to drift away from the meeting.
"Lieutenant." Governor Sigurdsen motioned for her to remain by the couch as the others moved away to prepare for the mission.
"Yes, Your Honor?" Shannon cocked an eyebrow.
"What should I...should we do if none of you come back?"
Stark regarded him silently, sorely tempted to reply: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." But a sidelong glance at the two merc guards and the young servant girl squashed that impulse.
"Pray." She shrugged, turning away from him. "God might be merciful, but I doubt the Invaders will be."
***
The midday sun beat down on Shannon's back, leaving her with an inescapable feeling of exposure and helplessness. It seemed odd, even now, to launch a commando raid in broad daylight, but the benefits of a night attack would have been illusory at best. The Invaders surely had infrared night vision and thermal imaging equipment, and there were no assurances they slept at night as humans did. Worst of all, and the final reason for deciding on high noon as H-Hour for the raid, they had to consider the fact that the Invaders ships were undoubtedly monitoring the planet from orbit.
They couldn't be sure what kind of computer technology the enemy had, but Republic ships and satellites had the ability to automatically scan for thermal anomalies. At night, the Marine vehicles would have stood out from the cold, desert surface like a Christmas tree; in the day, with the scorching flame of white-hot Tau Ceti beating down, the thermal output from the turbine-driven tactical vehicles would be insignificant.
Yet, despite all the logic behind her decision, sitting out on the rocky outcropping, with the shelter's dune buggy parked down the hill behind her and Nathan Tanaka by her side, she felt like somebody had drawn a bullseye on her back. Trying to shake that image, she raised her binoculars and focussed on the spaceport control center.
There was still some evidence on the building of the damage done in the invasion. Pockmarks f
rom bullet impacts scarred the front face, a single crater from a grenade explosion had taken a chunk out of a corner at hip level, and the front door had been blown off its hinges. A pair of bodies, still in their grey Port Authority coveralls, had been left to decompose only meters from the entrance, and Shannon flinched as she saw a local scavenger gnawing at one of the corpses.
But the building was still in use: through the doorway, she could see shadowed figures milling around, working the instrument boards and monitoring the launch systems. For a bizarre moment, she thought the figures were human, but then one stepped into the light from the entrance and she saw that it was one of the blue-skinned Invaders, sans armor and helmet. Still, it seemed different somehow from the one she'd seen face-to-face back at the mansion. After wasting a second staring at the creature, she realized what the difference was: its head. The cranium was larger than a man's and much larger than that of the other Invader she'd seen. It gave the creature an odd, lopsided look that sent shivers up her spine.
Tracking away from the control center, she found the shining, metallic strip of the maglev rail and followed it around to the laser-launch platform, where several cars were waiting to be unloaded, their cargo of launch pods squatting in utilitarian ugliness on the flat-bed car. The powerful laser discharged even as she watched, the ionization of its beam making the hair on the back of her neck stand up from several kilometers away.
Shifting her view to the left, she brought the rotund shape of the Invader shuttle into her view---either they were still loading the same craft Vinnie and Captain Trang had observed, or this was yet another launch vehicle. Probably the former, she judged: the loading ramp was up, the cargo doors closed, and it seemed that they were clearing the area around the shuttle in preparation for take-off.
Swinging the binoculars around ninety degrees, she focussed on a narrow draw some three klicks from the control center. Her mind ticked off the seconds and, right on cue, a dull-grey teardrop shape burst out of the draw in a cloud of dust and a whine of turbines audible even from their far perch.