Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks

by Owen R. O'Neill

Jeezus Christ! She almost bit her tongue trying not to stare, open-mouthed.

  “Converts to an active parafoil at about a thousand meters unless you wanna be really sneaky, in which case you can set it lower.”

  “How much lower?” This whole thing was beginning to sound very suspicious.

  “Well, Yu came in at a hundred once.”

  “A hundred meters!?”

  “A hundred feet, actually. They gave him a medal.”

  Now Kris did stare at Huron, perfectly speechless. Then: “And what are we gonna do?”

  “I have to talk to Fred about that.” With a grin again. Damn that grin—her suspicions got quite a bit darker.

  “Huron, how many times have you done this?”

  “Well, now that you bring it up . . . none.”

  “Are you fuckin’ kidding me!?”

  “I did read a manual though—”

  Oh my good fuckin’ gawd— “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” she hissed, very low.

  “In for a penny, in for a pound, Kris. You already had a lot on your mind.”

  You jag-fuckin’ rip-shit little—

  “Would it have made a difference? You can still stay onboard, Kris. No one will look down on you—we know you didn’t sign up for this. We can improvise something. It’s your choice.”

  Fine, asshole—put it all on me . . . No, that wasn’t fair—Oh fuck fair—No goddammit. She shook her head like a terrier shedding cold water. “No . . . sir. I told you I’m not copping out on this op. But . . .”

  “Yes?”

  She glared at the deck, struggling with the savage frown that darkened her face. “I just wish . . . A penny for a pound? What’s that shit mean, anyway?”

  “It means that once you get into a fighter’s cockpit, flying’s gonna seem like a dockyard holiday.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes of stark terror that lasted an eon, followed an hour and half of sheer exhilaration that could have gone on forever. That was Kris’s personal experience of reentry.

  They’d deployed from the corvette and used suit thrusters to decelerate to suborbital velocity, but hitting even the most tenuous atmosphere at 5.7 km/sec was like doing a belly flop into a pond from five meters up. Kris—who’d never been in a body of water bigger than a bathtub—could not have appreciated the comparison, nor did she appreciate the tremendous slap when it occurred. The suit took most of it, but if she hadn’t been scared out her wits, she would have been surprised that she still had all her teeth.

  Worse was to come: hitting the eddies, voids, and pockets of slightly denser atmosphere all along the boundary with space at that speed brought her excruciatingly well acquainted with what the members of CAT 5 called ‘rock and roll’ or ‘the good part’. During ‘the good part’ she wasn’t just tethered to Huron—she was clamped onto him like a limpet.

  But then the unseen nanobot reentry shield began to have effect, and the ride smoothed out as they entered the slightly denser air a few klicks down. The paralyzing terror began to fade as her frontal lobes came to believe that they were neither going to burn up nor auger in, and her limbs started to relax their cataleptic hold. By the time they crossed over the south pole, she was holding Huron by the hand, streaking northwards towards the morning which was just about to break.

  They crossed the equator with the unlit world below showing a rim of molten brass as the primary approached the western horizon from below (Rephidim rotating counter to Earth). She couldn’t see Huron’s face through the darkened visor, but the grip of his fingers communicated a thrill matching the one that had her heart beating fast, high in her chest.

  At 15-degrees north, they cut the terminator and emerged fully into the light, then left it behind as the reentry shield took a deeper bite. They were perceptibly descending now, a long glide that would take them another thirty degrees of latitude farther north and ten degrees of longitude to the west. At sixteen thousand meters altitude, their speed dropped to subsonic. At twelve thousand, the turbulent margins of the jet stream caught them up in a swirling dance where they joined hands and pirouetted together through the denser air, the rush she felt making her laugh for pure joy.

  The parafoils formed at a comfortable six hundred meters, and when they landed a few minutes later, within two hundred meters of their mark, the radiant grin was still on her face as she unsealed her helmet and took it off.

  “Fuck’n meow! Ya think they’d let us do that again?”

  Huron, his helmet off and his smile almost as broad, shook his head in wonderment. “I suppose you could ask the sergeant major for an application.”

  There was no time for leisurely reflection, however. The parasails reconfigured themselves into what amounted to a low-grade security enclosure to shield them from the prying eyes of any overhead sensors, but it would only last about twenty minutes. Within that time, they had to get out of their suits and into their combat armor and deal with all their gear. Two equipment canisters had been dropped with them: one held their armor, the section automatic weapon and extra ammo (they’d dropped with their personal weapons), along with their packs containing rations, camo-shelters and medical supplies. The second had EW systems, sapper and satchel charges, along with other demolition equipment, and a mole.

  The mole had been brought along because of the fence surrounding Mankho’s compound. It was a digging robot and a quite wonderful one at that. Through most soil types, it could burrow at two meters per minute and had the endurance to go a klick or two on one charge. It could leave a tunnel big enough a crawl through, or ‘swim’ through the dirt. It was accompanied by small bots that ran about on the surface to take care of seismic detectors and the like; the CATs called these lizards.

  Using lizards involved some evident risks, but Rephidim was very active geologically, meaning seismic sensors would have to be set to a relatively high threshold to keep from producing a stream of false alarms. Sounder data had told then that the soil around Mankho’s compound was such that the mole could achieve a decent rate of progress while maintaining an acceptable safety margin against detection. Just as importantly, the data showed that the fence went down only two meters and didn’t follow the profile of the underlying hard strata, leaving numerous places the mole could tunnel under without having to cut part of the fence at any point, which greatly simplified things.

  Of course, they had to get the mole there, and that meant lugging it a hundred klicks. It was broken into a dozen sections, one for each member of the team to carry, along with everything else they had. Kris was not officially a member of CAT 5, but she wasn’t officially an officer either, and while officers were by tradition exempted from being beasts of burden, they also—by tradition—shouldered their share of the load.

  So Kris wasn’t terribly surprised when, looking up from stowing her reentry gear in an empty crate (a drone from Kestrel would be down to retrieve it after the op was finished—win, lose or draw), she saw Marko Tiernan approaching. It was how he was approaching that worried her: staggering along with a metal section of the mole that was as almost big as her entire upper body. With a grunt, he set it down in front of her.

  “This ‘un’s for you, midshipman,” he said, dusting his hands and stretching.

  “Just me?” She eyed the mass. Marko topped her by a more than a head and out-massed her by at least fifty kilos. And she was supposed to carry this thing?

  “Yep.” He waggled a finger at the carrying handles. “See? Got it all rigged. Not so bad once ya get used to it.”

  “Oh.” Was he serious?

  He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Unless ya wanna carry that bitty thing over there.”

  She looked where he was pointing. There was a dark gray cylinder by the other crate, about the size of her forearm, with one hemispheric end. Yeah, right. This was clearly some sort of test. Well, if she at least tried, they probably wouldn’t make her carry the damn thing that far. Assuming she could even lift it.

  “No,”—looking down and
gauging the weight. “I’ll manage with this.”

  Marko displayed a toothy grin. “Good on ya, midshipman. You have fun now.”

  Sure, asshole. But she flexed her knees, grasped the two handles and heaved. The section shot into the air as she toppled backwards and landed hard on her ass. It was a hollow titanium shell and couldn’t have weighed much more than two kilos. No one laughed, but a few hoarse chuckles were heard, and the grins were near universal.

  Hauling herself to her feet, Kris rubbed what was sure to be a handsome bruise later.

  “Now weren’t that fun?” Marko asked, grin even brighter than before.

  “Stellar,” she muttered. Straightening all the way, she pointed at the gray cylinder. “So what’s that thing?”

  “That? That there’s the power supply. Go on. Pick ‘er up.”

  Limping over, Kris leaned down and tried to pick it up. “Shit!” It must’ve weighed thirty kilos if it weighed a gram.

  “Now ain’t you happy with your choice?”

  Kris looked back at the titanium shell and then down at the power supply. She nudged it with the toe of her boot. “No. I don’t think I am. You’re a burly guy—you struggle along with the big piece. I’m gonna take the bitty thing, after all.”

  Bending again, she grabbed the power supply in both hands and lifted it with a grunt.

  Marko switched his grin to a smile and sketched her a salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

  * * *

  The plan called for them to cover forty klicks that day and another fifty tomorrow, which would get them in the vicinity of the compound to await events. The terrain they would cross was marked by ridges and gullies, and tomorrow there was a river they’d have to cope with, but forty klicks was doable. They’d have to maintain six klicks an hour to do it, however.

  Six klicks an hour was a brisk pace when encumbered with a twenty-five kilo pack plus weaponry and ammo, and that fucking power supply she’d stupidly agreed to carry, even with the armor’s passive assist system, which fed back about ten percent of the energy expended in walking. Kris was sweating freely within half an hour and by the time Yu called the first ten-minute halt, her knees were shaking badly.

  Collapsing on a handy boulder, she popped her helmet visor and panted, sucking in great lungfuls of the sharp air and cursing whatever inner devil had made her want to show off in front of Tiernan. She didn’t even notice Master Sergeant Burdette coming over.

  “You know,” she said, sitting down next to Kris and offering a canteen. “Marko’s been pulling that shit with the mole skin ever since I’ve known him. Everyone falls for it.”

  Accepting the canteen, Kris slaked her parched throat. “Everyone?”

  “Everyone I’ve seen.”

  Kris handed the canteen back and Burdette capped it.

  “Damn few offer to carry the power supply afterward though.”

  As they stood up to resume the march, Marko came over, hefting the mole skin with one hand. He set it down in front of her again. “Y’know? This goddamn thing’s got me all tuckered out. Wanna trade?”

  Kris slung off the pack with the power supply in it, trying not to wince. “Yeah, okay. I’ll go for that.”

  * * *

  The primary was setting in the east when they reached the location selected for that night’s camp. As they set up their camouflage shelters and feasted on self-heating ration packs, Burdette mapped out the perimeter and assigned Fireteam Alpha first watch. Arno Watkins, however, had concerns about local flora and fauna—especially the former.

  “Hey, Top! What’s this I hear about singing bushes that walk around at night and eat things?”

  “It’s true, Watkins,” answered Burdette. “So be goddamned careful what you pick to piss on.”

  This led to a great deal of ribald speculation, which Yu tolerated for about a minute before cutting things short by saying, “Okay—let’s get back online. When you get home from this op, you can hunt up all the bush you want, assuming you can still find some that’ll give you the time of day.”

  Huron, looking at Sergeant Major Yu with a new appreciation, had to hide a grin as order was eventually restored.

  * * *

  They awoke at dawn the next morning under an ugly sky thick with dark roiling clouds. Chewing a ration bar, PFC Rachel Cates surveyed them with a considering eye. “Tut, tut,” she said, giving Kris a wink. “It looks like rain.” Then she ambled off, humming.

  Rain—buckets of it, that turned the lower areas they had to traverse into slurry. By local noon, they were already two hours behind schedule. At last, Yu signaled for them to take a break. Resting behind some boulders on the spine of a narrow ridge that split a wide plain maybe sixty meters below, Kris was gulping a hydration pack she hoped was spiked with enough electrolytes and whatever else to calm the agonized cramps in her legs, and trying to scrape kilos of gray-green greasy muck off her boots. In the last hour, lightning had started to enliven the rainstorm and a few of the team were watching with evident pleasure. Then nearly everyone jumped as three bolts struck the plain below in rapid succession, leaving great hissing circles of steaming earth.

  “Y’know,” Corporal Gergen commented, eyeing the clouds. “Maybe we oughta get off this ridge.”

  Specialist Ioan Resnick stared at him. “The lightning’s hitting down there, Benn. You wanna go down there?”

  Gergen shifted his gaze to a still-steaming patch of dirt down in the flat. “Gotta say, you may have a point.”

  * * *

  The storm ended as abruptly as it began, the clouds swept away as though by an enormous hand. In a sky too thin to show an honest blue, the red dwarf primary burned down with unwholesome vigor and they were all soon sweating in spite of the armor’s environmentals. Tech-Corporal Watkins was not impressed.

  “Who orders the weather on this fuckin’ planet, anyway?”

  Corporal Perez laughed at the notion that a dismal rock like Rephidim would have a weather service, as the Homeworlds and long-established colonies did. “Why don’t you write your senator?”

  “Now why did I think of that? Oh, maybe cuz the three-handed old putz can’t read. You’re a fuckin’ genius, Sam.”

  * * *

  The cracked and riven ground soaked up the deluge, leaving a few sorry mud puddles scattered across the landscape that glinted in the slanting ginger light. Dusk was fast approaching and they were still over an hour behind schedule, but Yu called a halt anyway to have Burdette send out some dragonflies to survey the terrain up ahead. Tiernan and Cates were scouting two klicks forward and could relay the data back, allowing the dragonflies to transmit in line-of-sight mode, which was advisable as they were just twenty klicks from Mankho’s compound.

  “Alright, people,” Yu announced. “We’re gonna take fifteen here.” They’d been pushing hard, but the day’s exertions hadn’t seemed to tell on him at all. Kris sat down right where she was, on a patch of still soggy ground. Huron came over.

  “How’s it going, Kris?” His voice was low and private.

  Breathing too hard to speak, she just shook her head.

  He reached out—she thought to take her pack and grabbed for his wrist to stop him, only to see he was offering her a ration bar.

  “Just suck on it at first,” he said in the same private voice. “It helps.”

  Taking it was trembling fingers, she did, but her stomach closed. There were feelings gnawing deep inside her, growing stronger the closer they got to Mankho’s compound. Holding the sticky rat-bar in unfeeling fingers she put her head to her knees, closed her eyes, and tried to breathe.

  When she opened them, Huron, Burdette and Yu were clustered a together in the lee of a rocky outcropping. Burdette and Huron were discussing something and Yu was talking quietly, evidently getting a report from Tiernan or Cates. She couldn’t have cared less.

  Sergeant Major Yu cut the connection with Cates and scanned the terrain to the east while Burdette checked the readout from the dragonflies. She projected th
e data on the ground with a map overlay.

  “This is our last hurdle,” Yu said and ran his finger along a river, about five kilometers distant, which was just visible as a narrow winding strip reflecting the strange coppery sky. The river marked the nominal boundary of Mankho’s domain. “Here’s the ford they use for wheeled vehicles,” he went on. “Only about three feet deep. They’re sure to have eyes on it though. Good bet they have eyes on this whole stretch.” He indicated a stretch of river for several klicks in either direction.

  “Suggestion?” Huron asked, following the finger.

  “I think we go down here, a few more klicks downstream.” Yu tapped a point on the projection. “Lots of growth along the banks here—good cover even if they have motion sensors. Paranoid bastard like that, he might.”

  “How do we cross?” The Doppler returns from the dragonflies showed the current swift and gamma-backscatter sounders showed river about three meters deep at that point.

  Yu winked. “Gotta cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  * * *

  In the darkness an hour later, with the dual moons just breaking the horizon, they knelt in the rush-like plants that grew thickly along both sides of the river, watching the wide black water ripple and purl along in front of them. Yu observed the turbulent flow and then examined the banks. “Gotta cross on a line,” he said after a minute. Then added: “Wish they had bigger trees in this fuckin’ place though.”

  Kris had finally managed to choke down most of the rat-bar. It made her queasy at first, but after a few minutes, her equilibrium started to reestablish itself. Now she cast a worried glance at the sergeant major—what exactly did he have in mind?

  Yu turned his head. “Rachel, Sam.” The two marines crawled up next to him. Yu pointed at river, about thirty meters across here. “You two think you can swim that?” They both nodded. “Fine. Marko, Kyle, take lines on three or four of them scrubby things there, low down.” Tiernan and Argento moved off and Kris watched amazed as Perez and Cates stripped. Argento came down and handed the lines across. Perez and Cates each looped a line around their waist, slung their rifles around their necks and slid into the water, quite naked. The others started bundling their castoff gear together.