by Marko Kloos
My helmet display comes alive with vision enhancements and environmental data readouts, and the image of my surroundings gets brighter and more defined. Willoughby was a cool planet when we settled humans here, with daytime temperatures no higher than ten or fifteen degrees Celsius. Right now, the air outside is thirty-two degrees, and the humidity reading from my helmet sensors is at 100 percent. In just twelve years, the Lankies have managed to turn the planet into a tropical hothouse, something that would take our terraforming units at least a century to achieve with a world of this size.
On the tactical screen overlay, I can see the drop ship overhead, clawing its way into the stormy sky to reach an altitude where it can stay reasonably close without getting pounded by the low-level winds that buffeted the hell out of us in the landing phase of our descent. One by one, the icons for the members of Dagger team pop up on my screen as their suits establish a low-power TacLink connection with mine. I signal to the section leaders, point down the road toward the admin center, and pump my fist once to signal the advance.
The colony looks like something from a post-apocalyptic drama show on the Networks. The concrete structures are so weathered that it’s hard to believe we only lost this place twelve years ago. The housing domes are dark with dirt and mold, and the surfaces are pockmarked with wear as if they’ve suffered a hundred years of erosion. There are shaggy patches of overgrowth sticking to almost every surface in sight. I walk over to the closest building, aware of Dr. Vandenberg following on my heels. There’s a large patch of the strange growth on the wall next to one of the doors. It looks like moss, but with much thicker strands and more complex patterns than the stuff on Earth. I shine my helmet light on it, and the color subtly shifts, adding a slight blue tone to the green as the cone of light passes over the patch. Elin reaches out and puts her hand on the moss, then runs her fingers through it like it’s the fur of an interesting animal.
“Have you seen this before?” I ask, and she shakes her head.
“Well, sort of,” she says. “From samples in the lab. Stuff they scraped off the rocks on Lanky worlds. But this is on a whole new scale. You don’t need a magnifying glass to see this.”
“Let’s move on,” I say. “You can collect samples when we’re done.”
She nods and pulls her hand away from the growth on the wall, then she looks at her glove as if she’s checking to see whether it left any residue.
We’re going to spend half the day in the decontamination chambers once we’re back on the ship, I think.
The roads are standard prefabricated slabs of concrete latticework, with octagonal holes in regular intervals to reduce weight and allow for drainage. In almost every gap in the concrete, plant life has come up in strands and vines, some standing ankle high. In many spots, the plants pushing up from below have cracked the concrete strands between the holes into pieces. In another ten years, all these structures will be swallowed by whatever it is the Lankies brought with them either on purpose or by accident.
Not all the buildings in the settlement survived the Lanky invasion unscathed. As we make our way down the street toward the admin building, we see some housing units that have been reduced to rubble, with only some jagged remnants of outer wall remaining, crushed by something large with a lot of weight and force. A hundred meters down the road from the drop-off spot, some pavement slats have been crumpled and squeezed upward at a thirty-degree angle. As we get closer and start to walk around the obstacle, we can see that whatever broke the thick concrete layer of the road surface left an indentation in the soil that’s half a meter deep. The hole is filled with water almost to the brim, and patches of the weird mosslike plant life are floating on the surface, swirling in the ripples whipped up by the wind. I can tell that Elin is trying to take in everything at once with her helmet’s sensors. She rushes over to the water-filled crater and kneels down in front of it to get the sensors and the light of her helmet as close to the surface as she can. I tap her on the shoulder as I pass her, and she gets up with a reluctant expression on her face.
“When we’re done,” I remind her.
Ahead, the admin building looms out of the rain, vast and gray. The Class IV structures are three-story bunkers with thick walls, designed to serve as emergency shelter for the colony during an attack or a natural calamity. They were built before the Lankies, so the calamities they had in mind were brief colonial tussles between NAC and SRA marines or periods of exceptionally harsh weather. Even though they were not built to keep Lankies out, they do a good job of it because the walls are reinforced ferroconcrete that’s over a meter thick at the weakest points. Even Lankies can’t crack a Class IV, but as we get close to this particular one, we can see that it wasn’t for a lack of trying. The building is shaped like a loaf of bread, sloped sides and a domed top to distribute outside loads, and the flanks of the structure are scored with dozens of long furrows that look like the world’s largest cat raked its claws down the sides. Some spots have big chunks of concrete torn out of them, and the steel reinforcement bars are jutting out of the holes, twisted and rusty. But none of the dents were deep enough to make it through the outer concrete walls and breach the building, even if it didn’t do the residents any good in the long run.
When we reach the end of the road that leads to the little plaza in front of the building, I signal the squad leaders. Lieutenant Philips takes Dagger Two’s four troopers to the northeast corner, where they turn and assume their overwatch positions. Lieutenant Dean and his Dagger Four element dash across the plaza and disappear around the far corner to settle in out of sight at the southwest corner.
“Dagger Four in position,” Lieutenant Philips reports in a few moments later.
“The clock is ticking,” I say on the platoon channel. “Dagger Three, move in and check the front door. Dagger One, bring up the rear with me.”
We make our way across the little plaza, jumping over half-meter cracks in the concrete that are teeming with alien plant life. The main entrance to the complex is tucked away in a concrete vestibule, and something tried to get to the door with so much vigor that the retaining walls of the vestibule are now knee-high rubble in front of the doors.
“The access panels are dead,” one of the Dagger Three troopers reports. “They must have knocked out the solar panels for the backup power bank.”
“Can we run a bypass with external power to juice up the system?” I ask.
“Negative, sir. No way to tap into the circuit without cracking open the walls.”
“I guess we’re doing it the hard way then,” I say and look around. I don’t really want to set off explosions in this graveyard-quiet place and make the ground shake, but if the power cells for the electronic door locks are dead, there’s no way to override the mechanism with the master code.
“Master key, aye,” Lieutenant Evans acknowledges. “Rees, Smith, get over here and stick some boom on the locks.”
We have the schematics for the Class IV shelter doors in our data banks, so the SEALs know exactly where to place the shaped charges to defeat the locking mechanism with the fewest explosives necessary. But it’s still a complex operation that requires more care than punching a numeric code into an access panel. By the time the demolition experts are done with their work, I feel like I have spent an hour on the rubble pile in front of the vestibule, even though only five minutes have passed in real time. The rain is coming in with unrelenting intensity, whipping across the plaza and seemingly changing directions every few moments as the winds shift.
“Master key is ready to go,” Staff Sergeant Rees finally announces.
We move off to the side and crouch in the shadow of the building, out of the blast cone of the charges.
“Light it up, Rees,” I say.
“Lighting up, aye. Fire in the hole.”
The charges go off with a boom that makes the rubble in front of the vestibule bounce. They’re relatively small packages of high explosive, but they still make a racket, and it’s
only amplified by the funnel-like nature of the concrete vestibule that directs the sound outward and to the west. The crack from the detonation rolls across the plaza and reverberates back from the nearby buildings and alleys. We still don’t know if Lankies rely at all on sound or vibration to find their way around and locate us, but the charges we just sent off generated plenty of both, and I feel a renewed sense of urgency to see the mission through as quickly as possible.
On my tactical display, Rapier Three-One, our battle taxi, is in a slow turn to port at the edge of my map scale, ten kilometers away and twenty thousand feet above the ground, a little too distant for comfort. If the Lankies rush us in the rain, the drop ship won’t be down on the deck quickly enough to make a difference. The seismic mines placed by the battlespace control squadron a few hours earlier are now our only early-warning system that can see farther than our eyeballs, and I am about to wager four squads of SEALs that those mines work as advertised.
“Door’s open,” Lieutenant Evans says.
“Copy that. Dagger One, Dagger Three, breach formation. Let’s go, let’s go,” I send.
I make my way to the front of the building again and climb the rubble pile by the doors. When I reach the top, I can see one-half of the double doors jammed at an angle but still mostly in place, the other blown out of the frame just enough to leave a little gap between the door halves that’s wider at the bottom than at the top.
“Mind your step,” I tell Dr. Vandenberg as she climbs up the rubble pile behind me, but she’s unencumbered by armor or weaponry and considerably more fleet-footed than I am in my battle rattle.
The SEALs file through the gap in the door one by one in front of us. When both squads are inside, I take a look around the plaza and verify the position of the overwatch squads. Then I start the short descent into the vestibule, which looms below surface level in the semidarkness, with its walls overgrown with moss and rubble strewn at the base. From my angle, it looks disconcertingly like a tomb.
CHAPTER 17
SQUALL LINE
As soon as I walk into the hallway beyond the entrance vestibule, the temperature seems to drop by ten degrees. Ahead of me, the light cones from the suits of the SEALs cut through the darkness and illuminate the walls and ceilings, throwing flickering shadows as they make their way down the hallway. I know that Dr. Vandenberg’s suit isn’t equipped with infrared or thermal imaging, so I turn on my own light, even though my bug suit provides me with augmented vision.
There’s a layer of concrete dust on the floor, and debris bits of various sizes litter the hallway. We don’t have to go far into the building to find our first unpleasant surprise.
“Body on the right,” one of the SEALs says in a low voice and points into the open doorway of a room. As I walk up, he makes way for me to see, and I look into the room he indicated. A corpse in colonial utility overalls is splayed out on the floor next to an overturned chair. After twelve years of decomposition in this air, there isn’t enough left to make out any distinguishing features or marks. I can’t even tell if the corpse belongs to a man or woman because most of the colonists wear the same utility clothing on the job. There’s a beverage mug on a desk next to the overturned chair, and a blank and silent data pad next to it that reflects the light from my helmet lamp. I take two steps into the room to look around. Whatever was in the mug has long since evaporated, leaving a dark crust at the bottom of the container. I know the layout of the building because the admin center in New Svalbard was a Class IV as well, but after all this time, I don’t recall the use of this room at that colony.
Elin mutters a soft curse into her helmet comms as she walks in carefully behind me.
“They probably sealed the door as soon as they realized they were under attack,” I say. “But the Lanky nerve agent went right through the air filters.”
“That’s a shitty thing to be a first for,” she replies in a low murmur. Then she kneels down next to the corpse and examines the body. “Looks like it went quick at least.”
“I was overhead a few days later,” I say. “In a drop ship. I saw the bodies in the street. It looked like the stuff had dropped them wherever they were standing or running.”
“You were here at First Contact?”
“Twelve years ago. Our ship ran into the minefield in orbit without warning. First casualties of the war,” I reply.
“How are you even alive?”
“I’ve asked myself the same question more than once,” I say. “Come on. Lots more rooms in this place.”
We walk out of the room with the corpse and follow the SEALs, who are now twenty meters farther down the long entrance hallway and almost at the central staircase.
“Hold up at the bottom of the stairs, One-Niner,” I send to Captain Harper, who is leading the Dagger One squad. “I have to check something for a second.”
“Copy, hold at bottom of the stairs,” Harper acknowledges and halts his squad with a hand signal.
There’s an office to my left that looks immediately familiar, and I shine my light into it. It’s the duty station of the colonial constable, the chief law enforcement officer on the planet. To my relief, there’s no corpse in here, just an empty room with a layer of dust on every surface. On the wall to the left of the door is a weapons rack with a security lock. The power in the building has been out for a decade or more, so the batteries for the backup circuits are drained, and the only way to open the lock for the weapons rack is to use the master key that’s usually on the duty constable’s person. But I don’t need to open the rack to get the picture. There’s an M-66 carbine in every one of the six locking brackets. When the Lankies hit the city, the cops didn’t even have time to get their guns out of the ready rack.
“Clock’s ticking, Major,” Captain Harper sends.
“Affirmative. Be there in a second,” I reply.
I leave the constable’s office and make my way down the hallways to join up with the SEALs, with Dr. Vandenberg two steps behind.
“Down the stairs to sublevel three, then right,” I say and motion my intent to take point.
We descend into the basement levels of the admin center on light boots, as if everyone is worried about disturbing the peace of the dead. It’s oppressively quiet except for the sound of our soles on the dusty concrete. Two more colonist corpses are splayed out on the bottom landing, one draped halfway on top of the other, as if they both tried to make for the safety of the basement shelter and succumbed to the nerve gas at the same moment. When I shine my helmet light down the corridor in sublevel three, thousands of dust motes drift slowly in the beam in front of me, stirred up by the movement of the air we are displacing with our bodies.
“Last door on the right,” I say and indicate the spot with a hand gesture. One of the SEALs from Dagger Two walks up to the door and tries the security panel.
“Dead,” he says. “But it’s just a level-one setup. Tiny charge should do it. Right between the panel and the frame.”
Another SEAL comes up and starts preparing a small breaching charge from a chunk of plastic explosives he pulls out of one of his armor pouches. I turn and motion for everyone to get back.
“Door demo,” I say. “Turn off your helmet audio.”
It only takes a few moments for the lead SEAL at the door to prep the cherry-sized charge and attach it to the right spot. He moves back for what seems like a cavalierly low number of steps, then turns away from the door.
“Fire in the hole,” he says.
The breaching charge is much smaller than the shaped charges we used on the heavy entrance doors, but this is a much more confined space. When the explosive goes off, it feels like someone stepped up to me and slapped me hard on both sides of my helmet above the ears. For a few moments, the hallway is full of billowing dust.
“Open sesame,” the lead SEAL says and nods at the door, which is swinging from its hinges. The part where the lock used to be now has a perfectly semicircular hole in it. The SEAL who blew open the l
ock steps into the room and pulls the door off the hinges completely, then leans it against the wall, with as little obvious effort as if he had moved a small stack of empty mess trays out of the way.
“Jesus, Sergeant Rees,” I say as he steps aside to let me in. “Tell me you couldn’t have kicked that door in just the same and saved us all the noise.”
Rees just flashes a grin and shrugs.
The network center is dark and quiet as well, a wholly unnatural state for a neural network facility. These are the nerve centers of warships and shore installations, and they are always powered up in day-to-day operations, backed up by at least three redundant circuits and emergency battery banks because they control all the data traffic. Everything that runs on a circuit connects to the network center via fiber-optic links, all the way down to the air-conditioning and the water temperature in the residential building units. To see one with all its consoles dark and its status lights out is a strange experience.
I walk to the storage racks in the back of the room, where finger-thick strands of fiber bundles connect to dozens of separate control modules. My neural network administrator training is a little dusty, but the equipment in this place is the same vintage as the stuff I trained on in tech school. I follow the fiber strands down to the storage bank, where the system’s memory modules are plugged into hot-swappable bays. Under normal circumstances, I’d give the system the instruction to power down the storage array before handling the modules, but this rack hasn’t been energized in many years, and any potential data corruption from the final power outage has already occurred a long time ago.
I remove the latches for the access cover and expose the module bays. Then I start flipping the bay locking levers and pulling out modules one at a time. They’re square little boxes the size of bricks and about as heavy, and the local storage rack has twenty of them. Every single byte of information generated by the colony’s electronic devices is stored in a redundant parity system on these modules, everything from the last maintenance restart to the moment the storage bank ran out of backup battery juice. Even if the colony’s neural networks administrator had just performed a wipe and a system reboot right before the Lankies landed, the backup systems would have kept recording as long as the backup circuit had power, and the batteries would have been enough to keep the system up for a few months. Halley and I got here on Versailles a month after the initial landings, and I realize that somewhere on these memory modules, there’s probably a record of our arrival at the distant terraforming station and our subsequent battle with the Lankies. The security systems at the terraforming station would have sent their data with the nightly backups to the main hub until the station was destroyed, even though there was nobody left alive in Willoughby City to see or acknowledge the routine transmissions.
