"Got it in one, Sub-Lieutenant."
The young officer's face lit up, "Are you suggesting that..."
"That there is an excellent chance that ten years ago, Hercules was here. Three years after it was declared overdue and missing."
"Just before the end of the war," Caine mused.
"Then we might be on the trail," Orlova said.
Nodding, Marshall replied, "I think there's a good chance of that. I can't think of any other reason to find a missile of that vintage out there; they didn't get sold too widely outside the service because of all the bad publicity."
Caine looked at both of them, "You two need to be careful. If I might speak freely."
"Always."
"You're both too emotionally involved in this. You can't spin off a single missile into a long-lost battlecruiser."
Marshall said, "Deadeye..."
She held up her hand, "All I'm saying is that neither of you should get your hopes up. It's a bit of a leap from finding a missile that could easily have been looted from some stores depot to actually finding evidence that the ship was here."
"There's something else, as well," Orlova said. "Why?"
"Sub-Lieutenant?"
"Why would the Hercules be attacking that space station?"
"I've no idea. Let's hope that we get the chance to ask at some point."
Chapter 12
There was a palpable air of excitement throughout the ship as the bridge crew prepared for the exit to hendecaspace. Connie Franklin, the duty watch officer, fidgeted as she stood behind Marshall's chair; the sure-fingered Midshipman Varlamov was at the controls, with Cunningham leaning over his shoulder. Turning, Marshall saw Spinelli's fingers hovering over his sensor station like a pianist about to begin the performance of a lifetime; it wasn't every day that a starship made the first emergence of a new planet.
"Warning light on, Captain," Varlamov said. "Egress in ten seconds."
He tensed himself for the emergence, but as usual, hardly felt it. The viewscreen popped on, focused dead center on the planet. The oceans were there, right enough, swirling around the outskirts of a huge continent, but the major continent seemed mostly barren, an assortment of browns, ringed with dark greens and browns at the coast. He leaned forward in his chair, looking over the inhabitable portions of the planet again, taking in every detail.
"Got something in orbit, sir. I'm picking up eight stations in an equatorial orbit and two more in polar orbits, obviously some sort of satellite system," Spinelli said.
"Weapons?" Caine asked, urgently.
"Nothing I can detect. No lasers or missiles. We've just been pinged, though; I'd say we're looking at an early warning system."
"What about the planet?"
"Life, and lots of it."
"Where?"
"One big continent, with a central desert surrounded by rain forest. Hot, too; equatorial temperature's up over thirty Celsius."
"Spinelli, those satellites?"
"We've just been pinged again, but no attitude change apparent, and no sign of activity on the planet."
Marshall leaned forward, rubbing his hand against his chin, "And the rest of the system?"
"Nothing within a light-minute."
"Mr. Varlamov, take us into a nice high orbit, keep the inclination as far as possible from those satellites, just in case. I don't want to be within a thousand miles of one."
"Aye, Captain," the midshipman replied, his fingers dancing over the panel.
"What's the drill, skipper?" Franklin asked. "If you want volunteers for a landing team..."
With a chuckle, Marshall waved a hand, "Sorry, Sub-Lieutenant, I think I'll be heading that one." A look from Cunningham gave him some pause on that. "We settle into orbit, take a couple of days to survey and lob down some probes, and look more carefully at the satellites."
"We could get started on that now, sir," Caine said. "Before Alamo gets too close."
Marshall nodded. "Fire a missile. Have it get within, say, a mile of one of them. Make sure it has escape velocity, though; I don't want to accidentally bomb someone."
"No, sir!"
"And disarm the warhead. I want anyone looking to think 'probe' not 'battle stations'."
"Will do."
Ten seconds later, the ship shook almost imperceptibly as the missile arced away from the ship, the track racing ahead at a far greater acceleration than Alamo could ever manage. Marshall looked down at his console, watching a stream of reports feed in from across the ship. He shook his head, looking up at Dietz.
"Mulenga's busy. I'm already getting data from the sensor stations."
"Something interesting, sir," Spinelli said.
"What is it, spaceman?" Marshall stood up, making his way over to the chair.
"We thought one big moon, but it looks like there are two. A small asteroid, about a mile or so across, in a high orbit."
Memories of the impact crater on Sagdeev flooded to Marshall's thoughts, "Could it have been placed there?"
"Not impossible, but no heat signatures. Nothing on the side of the moon we can see, either. Oh, hold on. There are structures of some kind on the surface of the asteroid. Definitely man, well, sentient-made."
"And the planet?"
He looked up, smiling, "I'm picking up what must be settlements, sir. Scattered across the western coast of the super-continent, a couple higher up in the central desert. This planet isn't just inhabitable; it's inhabited."
Marshall clasped a hand on the sensor technician's shoulder, "I don't know whether to be glad to find some intelligent life or sorry someone else got here first."
Ivanov looked up from his communications station, "I'm not picking up any signals, sir. They must know we're here."
"With those satellites watching us like hawks, they couldn't miss us," Caine said.
"Try English, Mandarin, Russian, first. A thought struck him. And Tatar."
Dietz nodded, "Sagdeev."
"Run that cycle twice, then go for the First Contact package. Lots of good mathematics and chemical formulae for them to play around with."
"Aye, sir."
Caine looked up from her console, "Missile will be at closest approach in five seconds, sir."
Everyone looked anxiously up from their consoles at the holo-display; the only noise on the bridge was the faint burr of Ivanov recording the message for transmission. Closest approach came, and passed, and the missile arced away. More than a few sighs of relief broke the silence, and Caine looked up at Marshall.
"We should take a closer look at those satellites, just in case."
Nodding, Marshall replied, "Four man crew. You and Orlova for the tactical and security analysis, take one of Quinn's EVA techs, Smythe maybe, and," he smiled, "Steele as your pilot."
She rolled her eyes, but nodded, and started to issue the summons before leaving the bridge. Cunningham slid into her station and started to reset the controls; she paused at the elevator.
"I'll have to think of some suitable way to get my revenge, skipper," she said, quietly.
Smiling, the captain gestured towards the elevator, "As soon as you get back, Lieutenant."
Dietz continued to lean over his screen, looking at the reports flooding in, "If those are humans, then there are probably a lot of them down there. Hundreds of thousands, at least."
"Which suggests a long-established colony. With a significant space-based infrastructure to develop a satellite system from scratch like that."
Cunningham turned from the tactical console, "I've run them through the warbook. Not even a ghost of a match, sir."
"Not at all? Nothing in historical archives?"
"Nothing. That's a freshly-developed technology."
"So non-human, then. Ivanov, any response?"
"I'm afraid not, sir."
"Hmm." Marshall stood up, walking over to the holoprojector, looking out at the rapidly expanding sensor sphere. By now it was touching two of the other planets in the system, and there was
n't a sign of anything else out there. No ships, stations, or bases. Just an inhabited world surrounded by a network of satellites.
"Shuttle is away, Captain," Cunningham said, interrupting his reverie. Marshall looked down at his watch; Caine had been quick off the mark. "Track them in, Spinelli, all the way. Just in case."
"Yes, sir."
Marshall tapped a button on his console, "Mr. Mulenga, if you can drag yourself away from the consoles, I'd like your impressions."
"Amazing data coming in, sir. That planet definitely supports life, as we know it. If it is an alien race down there, then it must be one compatible with ours."
"Sir, they aren't aliens," Spinelli interjected. "I just got a nice close shot of one of the satellites. It's marked with a number '4'."
Sighing, Marshall said, "So much for First Contact, then."
"At least they don't match Republic markings, sir," Franklin said.
"I'd be more than disappointed if the Lunar Republic had managed to get that big a jump on us, Sub-Lieutenant."
He watched the shuttle race ahead of Alamo, hurling itself into a matching orbit with the satellite, and sat back in his command chair as the reports continued to flow in from all across the ship. The settlements all seemed to be occupying a huge river delta, a land of swamps and marshes; he couldn't think of a worse place to set up a colony. Visual observation of a lot of boats on the rivers and hugging the coastline, but nothing much out to sea – after all, they didn't really have anywhere to go.
"Time to orbit, Mr. Varlamov?"
"Orbital insertion in nine minutes, sir. The shuttle will be there in five."
"Hendecaspace to orbit in twenty minutes," Marshall said, shaking his head.
Cunningham leaned over, "Helps to have the big mass points nice and close by. This is going to be a haven for traders when it gets properly opened up."
"I'm surprised it hasn't already."
Spinelli turned, his face white. "Aspect change from the shuttle's target satellite, sir!"
Marshall raced over to the sensor console, "What is it?"
The technician flicked a switch, throwing an image onto the main screen. A long tube was unfurling out of the satellite, leaping out into space almost half a mile, longer than Alamo's laser cannon. The shuttle had started to change course; evidently the occupants had seen what was going on, and the bridge crew watched with a strange fascination as support struts locked into place.
"Varlamov, get that shuttle moving," Marshall yelled; he was already on the communicator, calling instructions, but it was to no avail.
"Energy spike!" Spinelli yelled, and the shuttle seemed to crack open. At least one engine was still firing, and it began to curve down towards the planet, still decelerating out of control, sending Marshall's heart into his mouth. He gripped the armrests of his chair until his knuckles turned white, and stared at the image of the shuttle, tumbling end over end.
"What the hell was that?" Cunningham yelled.
"I picked up a long series of magnetic force lines from that structure, sir. I'd say we're looking at a particle cannon," Spinelli said.
"That's theory, spaceman."
"It's fact today, sir."
Marshall shook his head, then called out to the midshipman at the hell, "Get us out of here, fast!"
The young midshipman paused for a split second and then began to work, hurriedly typing orders into the computer. In the background, Marshall could hear Dietz calling the crew to battle stations, locking down the compartments, but he only had eyes on the shuttle, slowly spiraling down towards the planet. The engine stopped firing after a long pulse, but that pulse threw them towards the populated part of the planet, and the thrusters angled the hull up into re-entry attitude.
"Someone's alive on there," he said, then turning to Cunningham. "Gloves off, Lieutenant. Spill a flight of missiles at that satellite. Let's see if we can take it down."
With a predatory grin, he complied, pressing down a trio of keys; a shudder raced through the ship as the three missiles raced out towards the satellite, as Alamo was beginning to slowly turn away, the engines firing to slew the ship from an orbital insertion into an escape vector. Fuel was burning away at a furious rate as the ship steadily changed its course, while the missiles continued along their track.
"Thirty seconds to impact, sir."
Varlamov turned from his station, "Escape orbit attained, Captain."
"Very good, Midshipman. Spinelli, I want that shuttle tracked all the way to the deck."
"I'll try, Captain, but there's a lot of cloud cover."
Cunningham yelled, "All three missiles just went dead, sir! All telemetry just winked out."
"Confirmed," Spinelli said. "They're just drifting, Captain. Overshoot by five thousand miles. Impact somewhere out to sea according to computer projections."
"Still no contact, Ivanov?"
"Not with the shuttle or the surface, sir," the communications technician replied. "I'm still trying with everything I've got."
"Keep it up as long as you can."
"Shuttle entering atmosphere now, sir," Spinelli said.
Marshall turned to the holodisplay, watching the shuttle curve down towards the surface. Those vessels weren't designed for ship-to-surface operation; the hull was strong enough that a good pilot should be able to survive a single re-entry under power, but it would take a whole new level of skill to nurse it down unpowered, only using the dynamics of the hull itself for the landing. He willed it down through the plasma sheath, looked until it disappeared into a huge bank of clouds, and vanished from view.
"I lost it at twenty thousand feet, sir," Spinelli said, mournfully. "I think they made it through re-entry, but the landing itself..."
"That will be a work of art, Spaceman. I'm just sorry we don't get to watch it." He was expressing a lot more confidence than he felt; his imagination was having no difficulty at all picturing the bodies of his crewmates, his friends, wrapped in twisted metal on some barren, forgotten wasteland. "What about the satellite."
"Returning to previous aspect, sir. No change."
"What's our course, Mr. Varlamov?"
"Extremely high elliptical orbit, sir. Best I could manage in the time."
Marshall nodded, "You did fine, Midshipman."
He looked around the bridge, and said in his most confident voice, "We're going to get our people back."
"If they survived," Franklin said in a low voice, looking down at the deck.
"They survived, Sub-Lieutenant," Marshall replied, sitting back in his chair.
Chapter 13
Smoke filled the shuttle's cockpit as Orlova carefully dragged Steele's unconscious form away from the controls and slid into the pilot's seat. Her hands were clumsy in the spacesuit gloves; had she known she was going to be piloting, she'd have worn a flight suit. Steele had managed to get them deep into the atmosphere, pulling them onto the right trajectory, but the control surfaces simply weren't working. A series of frantic button presses pulled the nose up slightly, just enough to buy them a little more glide time, but the altimeter – which had popped up in a really inconvenient place on the panel – was falling far too fast.
Thinking quickly, she pulled out the thruster controls and jammed them full on. Anything that could slow their speed would help at this point. The sensors had all been knocked out by the impact, and she wasn't hearing anything from the passenger compartment – something she tried to put out of her mind. Finally they broke through the cloud bank, and she peered down and saw nothing but jungles; tall trees bending over in high winds, rain sweeping down in thick waves. If this was what the usual weather was like, she wasn't going to enjoy her stay that much.
Assuming she lived to enjoy it at all. These shuttles didn't even have any landing gear. The altitude reading dropped down from five figures to four, and she jabbed down futilely at the main engine. One quick burst would slow them, but the warning lights were a collection of reds and blacks. Remembering her training, she tried t
o go limp in her seat as the jungle raced towards her, whispering half-forgotten prayers that the undergrowth would arrest their fall. There was a loud crash, and everything went black.
"Maggie?" A familiar voice called out from the darkness. She opened her eyes, and everything was an unfocused blur; she blinked a few times to try and clear it, then suddenly realized that she was soaking wet. Caine was standing over her, holding a first aid kit, a nasty cut running down her forehead. There was an odd tang to the atmosphere, something she couldn't quite work out, like tasting exotic spices. She tried to focus on Caine.
"What happened?"
Caine put an arm under her shoulder, helping her to sit up. "You managed to bring us down with a crash landing. I got you out of the wreck; it was smoldering rather nicely, but with all this rain I don't think it's going to catch fire any time soon."
Orlova tried to look around, and gave that up with a grunt of pain, "The others?"
"Smythe's dead. Killed in the attack. Steele's still out cold and I can't wake her. Can you walk?"
"I can try." With a herculean effort, and an assist from Caine, she managed to pull herself to her feet. Her legs didn't actually hurt; just her upper body. Nothing seemed to be broken. She looked around at the shuttle; it had split into three pieces on landing, and components were strewn across the jungle, some even dangling from the trees.
"Impressive, isn't it," Caine said. "While you were having your nap I ran into the wreckage to see what I could salvage. It doesn't amount to much; one revolver, ship-side issue, with a clip of ammunition, a half-used medikit, about a week's rations, a chemical testing kit, and a stretcher."
"A stretcher?"
"It will be when we finish it. No communicators, though. My datapad was smashed in the landing – so were all the others. Systems are a total write-off."
Looking up at the unbroken clouds, Orlova said, "Alamo will be looking for us by now."
"They've got to get past those satellites first. Danny'll find a way, but it could take a while. We need shelter."
Orlova looked around the sudden jungle, at the slimy purple mud running up the side of her boots. She was already feeling cold through the torn gaps in her suit, and started to take off the gloves. Caine was already mostly out of the suit, and seemed to be wearing part of a couch lining wrapped clumsily around her top.
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