Issue In Doubt

by David Sherman

  “Ah yes,” Raub said with a sigh. “Weapons aren’t organic, so they aren’t a strong suit of mine.” He looked Talbot in the eye, then at Army CoS Robinson. “But the engineering people I gave them to tell me they’re not anything like what we have. Their caliber is smaller than 5.56mm and bigger than flechette, partly powered by something resembling a low-power railgun.” He shook his head. “Whatever that means.”

  “Back to the gear,” Hobson said. “We can return to the weapons later.”

  Raub shook his head again. “The harness is stitched together with a vegetable fiber of unknown origin. The same for the pouches attached to it. The vegetable fiber is also presumably from the aliens’ homeworld. The stitching is of a type that could have been done in a human factory.” He looked at Hobson and shrugged. “Without more artifacts, or knowledge of the place of origin of the harness, there really isn’t anything more I can say.”

  Ignatz Gresser asked, “What can you surmise about the biology of the animal the leather comes from?”

  “There I’m on slightly firmer ground.” Raub straightened in his chair and leaned his angular body forward. “We were able to secure tissue and fluid samples of the prisoner—non-destructively, let me assure you,” he rapidly added when Walker looked like she was about to protest. “We went to lengths to avoid injuring him.”

  “Are you sure the alien is a ‘he’?” Walker asked. “I’ve seen the pictures. The creature is naked, and it has what looks like a vaginal slit between its legs.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Raub said, “but body waste comes from that slit, and there is no evident anus. We believe it is more analogous to a cloaca.”

  Walker nodded. “So the sex organs are interior. Have you seen anything like a penis come out of the cloaca?”

  “No we haven’t,” Raub admitted.

  “Then it just as well could be female?”

  Raub spread his hands. “It could, yes. But in most life forms that we’ve encountered, both on Earth and on the explored planets, the males, or male analogs, of most species are the more aggressive, more combative, of their species. Granted, there are a large number of insectoids and piscine species in which the female is the more aggressive, but the larger animals—reptilians, avians, mammalians and their analogs, it’s the male that’s combative. For all we know, these aliens have more than two sexes or genders. But it’s a convenient convention to call the alien a ‘he’ rather than an ‘it’.”

  Walker turned over a hand, indicating that she was willing to accept Raub’s explanation for now.

  Raub nodded at the Secretary of State, and continued. “The alien’s DNA is, of course, totally different from that of humans. But analysis of the leather of his harness showed that the animal its leather came from is closely related to the alien itself, strongly indicating that it evolved on the same world. The same goes for the threads of the stitching. Naturally, we don’t know what the alien eats. However, his amino acids are comprised of the same elements ours are: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Not, of course, in exactly the same ratios. And there are only twenty, instead of the twenty-two that we have. We don’t yet know which are the aliens’ essential acids, so we don’t know what to feed him.”

  “What are you feeding him then?” Caruana asked.

  Raub nodded at the question. “We’re offering him a variety of foods, both animal and vegetable, cooked and raw. He wouldn’t take any at first, but we ate samples to show him that they weren’t poison. It’s too early in the process to determine which he can hold down, and whether any of them provide him actual nutrition. He seems to prefer semi-cooked meat to other foodstuffs.” He looked around, noticing the expression of boredom on the faces of some of the military and non-scientists and decided to wrap up his presentation. “Otherwise, we surmise that he comes from a world with a similar gravity and atmosphere to Earth normal, although his lack of clothing suggests the world might be somewhat warmer, perhaps it orbits closer to its primary.” He paused and asked, “Are there any other questions for right now?”

  “How has he behaved toward you and your people?” Talbot asked.

  “He’s been largely threatening, but we have him in a cage and feed him through a one-way drawer so that he can’t get to us.”

  “What about his talons, are they always out?”

  Raub shook his head. “Our vid surveillance shows that his talons are folded away when he thinks he’s alone, but are extended when he can see one of us.”

  “Wait a minute,” Caruana said. “Where does his talons go when they aren’t extended?”

  “They fold back along the sides of his fingers.”

  “That’s curious,” Caruana murmured. Then louder, “If his talons are folded against his fingers, how manipulative are his fingers? I mean, how could his kind build anything?”

  “We believe that when his talons are, ah, retracted you might say, they become flexible. We will have to sedate him and perform a close examination, perhaps even surgery, in order to be certain of that, and learn to the mechanism if they do become flexible.”

  “When do you think you’ll do that?” Robinson asked.

  “In the next few days, sir. I can’t be more specific. We don’t know which sedative will put him under for long enough. Or which might kill him, for that matter.”

  “The big question I have,” Chairman Welborn asked, “is, could this alien, his species, be the ones responsible for the destruction of those seventeen dead civilizations we’ve discovered?”

  Raub hesitated before answering. “Sir, I have no way of knowing. Is it possible? Yes. Is it the fact?” He shrugged and spread his hands. “Without considerably more data, I can’t say.”

  “Then it’s also possible that they aren’t the ones?” Walker asked.

  “That’s right, ma’am.”

  “I’d like to get back to the weapons,” Talbot said when it seemed neither Walker nor Raub had anything else to say.

  “As I said, General, I’m not an engineer or a soldier, I don’t really know anything about them.”

  “I’m aware of that, Mr. Raub. But surely the engineers told you something beyond the caliber and propulsion system?”

  “Well...” Raub didn’t know what to say.

  “Do the engineers think they can replicate the weapons?” the Marine prompted.

  “Oh, yes sir! They’ve already disassembled them and are figuring them out.”

  Talbot nodded. “Would you be so good as to have them forward their findings to me? And if they do replicate them, I want to see the weapons.” He noticed the sour expression on Madison’s face and added, without looking directly at the CNO, “We might want to modify our body armor, depending on what the weapons do to our existing armor.”

  “Certainly, General,” Raub said, relieved that he didn’t have to say anything more about a topic on which he was as ignorant as he was about the weapons. Yes, let the engineers deal with the Marines.

  After that, Hobson looked around. Nobody else seemed to have anything to add, or have an informed question to ask.

  “All right, then. The President has already given his go-ahead to launch a military operation to Troy. We don’t know a damn thing about what might be waiting for us there. It could be a small force that the recon elements had the bad fortune to chance upon. It could be a major army of occupation. It could be the beginning of a colony.” He paused before continuing portentously, “Or we could find a staging operation for the invasion of another human world, even Earth itself.” He looked at Welborn. “Prepare a force strong enough to meet any of those contingencies. You are authorized to tell your top staffs as much as they have to know in order to plan the operation—that much and no more, and with the same resignation option and penalty as presented at the beginning of this meeting. If nobody else has anything to add, this meeting is over.”

  He stood to leave, but paused when Walker asked,

  “But where are the people, where are their bodies?”

  “Maybe w
e’ll find out once we get there.” Hobson left without another word.

  The Joint Chiefs began their planning, but the rest of the military continued in their normal training regimens.

  Chapter Four

  The Central Pacific and Oahu, Hawaii, North American Union.

  “All right, people, you know the drill.” Staff Sergeant Ambrosio Guillen shouted loudly enough to be heard over the whine of the landing craft motors and sloshing of water in the welldeck of the Landing Ship Infantry NAUS Oenida. “Keep it by squads.”

  “As if we can do anything else,” PFC Harry W. Orndoff grumbled.

  Lance Corporal John F. Mackie half turned back and grinned at Orndoff; the junior man was right, the way the Marines of third platoon were lined up to board the landing skids it was almost impossible for anybody to get separated from his squad.

  “Eyes front!” Sergeant James Martin snarled from his position behind his first fire team.

  Mackie snapped back to his front, his eyes fixed on the back of his fire team leader’s helmet, and continued shuffling forward.

  First squad reached its skid and Corporal Harry C. Adriance, the first fire team leader, dropped to his belly to slide in, pushing his rifle ahead of himself. Mackie followed, and found his position to the right of Adriance. Orndoff slid in to Mackie’s right, and PFC William Zion to the corporal’s left. Martin squeezed in next to Zion. Second and third fire teams followed under Guillen’s watchful eye. The rest of the platoon quickly boarded their skids.

  Then all that was left of India Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines to board was the company command group. Minutes later, the Oenida’s bow opened like a giant clamshell set on edge, and the skids slid out, into the warm waters of the Central Pacific Ocean, sixty kilometers off the east coast of Oahu. The skids maneuvered to get in line abreast a few hundred meters shoreward of the ship. There they waited, slowly bobbing in the gentle swells, while Kilo, Lima, and Weapons Companies boarded skids and formed waves behind India Company.

  On board the Oenida, the landing launch officer keyed the final command that transferred control of the landing force to the ground commander, and the four waves of skids, looking like nothing so much as manic, oversized sea turtles, shot toward land at close to 100 KPH. The skids’ periscopes, all that showed above the waves, threw up rooster tails of spray. At ten kilometers off shore, the skids cut their speed in half, reducing the height of their rooster tails. At five kilometers, most of the skids dropped their periscopes, making them almost impossible to spot from the beach.

  Nearly an hour after starting toward shore, the first wave of skids surged through the surf and up the beach to the edge of the trees of Bellows Field Park, and the Marines jumped up through the suddenly opened tops of the skids and raced into the trees, rifles at the ready.

  “Go, go, go!” Guillen and Second Lieutenant Henry A. Commiskey both shouted on the platoon net.

  “Move, move, move!” the squad and fire team leaders shouted on the squad nets.

  As he ran, Mackie glanced to his right to make sure Orndoff was with him and saw, twenty meters away, the famous trid actor Amos Weaver and the equally famous director Ulysses G. Buzzard. The two were intently talking as they watched the wakes of the oncoming skids as they rose above the surface of the bay. An assistant standing behind Buzzard was taking notes. Beyond them, Mackie saw trid-cam crews setting up their equipment. He curled his lip at the sight, but didn’t break pace in his charge across the beach.

  Ten meters into the trees, Sergeant Martin called for first squad to hit the deck and take up firing positions. As one, the thirteen Marines thudded to the ground under the weight of their combat loads and put their rifles to their shoulders, looking along the barrels farther into the trees, looking for anything that would indicate an aggressor was there.

  “First squad, report!” Martin ordered.

  “First fire team, sound off,” Adriance snapped.

  “Mackie!” Mackie called back.

  “Orndoff!”

  “Zion!”

  “First fire team, all present,” Martin reported.

  In seconds, all three fire teams of first squad had reported everybody present, and Martin reported to Commiskey. So did second and third squads, along with the gun squad attached to the platoon.

  “Third platoon, stand fast and look alert,” Commiskey barked.

  “What was that back on the beach?” Orndoff asked Mackie as soon as it became evident that they’d be in position for at least a few minutes. “That looked like Amos Weaver.”

  “Where have you been, Orndoff? That was Amos Weaver. And Ulysses G. Buzzard next to him.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “Wow, I was almost close enough to Amos Weaver to touch him!”

  Mackie shook his head. How could Orndoff be so dense he didn’t realize Buzzard and Weaver were there setting cam-lines to shoot second battalion when it made a landing in obsolete armored amphibious vehicles in the wake of 3rd Battalion’s landing? How could anybody in the 1st Marines not know they were making an epic trid of one of the major sea battles of the twenty-second century European Union War, and had hired second battalion as extras? Mackie grimaced; he thought Buzzard should have hired 3rd Battalion instead of second. Hell, everybody in the First Marine Division knew 3rd Battalion was the best in the 1st Marines, probably the best battalion in the entire division. Maybe the best battalion in the entire Marine Corps.

  Mackie’s reverie was interrupted by Martin’s order: “First squad, on your feet. We’re going in column. First fire team, second, and third. I’m between first and second. Third, maintain contact with first gun team. Move out.”

  “Mackie, take point,” Adriance ordered. “Me, then Zion. Orndoff, maintain contact with Sergeant Martin. Do you have the route, Mackie?”

  Mackie turned on his heads-up-display. A map showing the terrain a kilometer in each direction appeared. Red dots, many of them slowly moving, showed the last known positions of other members of the company. The dot in the middle blinked, indicating his position. A small cluster of purple dots to his right rear had to be Buzzard, Weaver and their aides. A red line showed the route Mackie was to follow in leading the squad. There were none of the blinking yellow lights that would show suspected positions of aggressor forces. Mackie didn’t attach any importance to the lack of yellow, he’d been in the Marines long enough to know that the aggressors wouldn’t necessarily show up anyway.

  “Got it,” Mackie reported.

  “Go,” Adriance told him.

  Mackie oriented himself on the HUD map, picked a faintly seen landmark through the trees, turned his HUD off, and stepped out on a meter-wide trail, headed for his aiming point. From here on, Adriance would direct him.

  The trees weren’t particularly high or very thick, which made for a spotty canopy that allowed plenty of sunlight through for dense undergrowth to sprout. Numerous narrow paths wove through the area. Some were worn by small game and other animals, others by the many civilians who came to Bellows Field Park for recreation—it was common for Marines practicing wet landings to charge up the beach through crowds of startled sunbathers. Because Bellows Field was a state park as well as a military training area, the Marines stayed on paths instead of breaking their way through the brush as they would in other training areas in order to protect the environment.

  A hundred meters along, Mackie toggled his helmet net to the fire team circuit. “See anything on your HUD?”

  “I’ll let you know if anything pops,” Adriance answered. “Just keep your eyes peeled.”

  “Aye aye.” Mackie kept swiveling his head side to side, looking into the trees in all directions, the muzzle of his rifle constantly swinging to point where his eyes went. He swallowed. Something wasn’t right. He couldn’t remember another training exercise where the platoon hadn’t made contact within a hundred meters of the waterline.

  Then he saw a flash up ahead and froze, with his left hand dropped down an
d out from his side, palm facing the rear, signaling Adriance to stop.

  “What do you have?” Adriance asked.

  “I don’t know. Movement off the trail about thirty meters ahead.” Mackie lowered himself to one knee, looking to where he’d seen the motion, pointing his rifle at it.

  In a few seconds, Martin dropped to a knee next to him. “Tell me.”

  Mackie pointed. “See that double-trunked tree on the left and the mound next to it?”

  “‘Bout a meter high?” When Mackie nodded, Martin said, “Got it.”

  “I couldn’t see for sure what it was, but something moved there.”

  “Did you see it?” Martin asked Adriance.

  “No. My HUD doesn’t show anybody, either.”

  “You sure you saw somebody, Mackie?”

  “I saw something. It was too fast, I couldn’t tell if it was a person. But it might be.”

  Martin thought for a moment, looking where Mackie said he saw motion. “All right, Mackie, you saw it, you go. Adriance, send somebody with him.”

  “Orndoff,” Adriance called softly, “you go.”

  Mackie looked back and signaled Orndoff to join him. “I’m going up the right side of the trail. You go up the left. When I reach that mound, I’m going over it. You hit it from the flank, and be ready to blow away anybody you see who isn’t me. Got it?”

  “Got it.” Orndoff sounded like he had a frog in his throat.

  Padding rapidly, Mackie headed for the low mound, keeping his eyes and rifle sweeping over and around its sides. There was no movement and no sound. As soon as he was alongside the mound, he spun to his left and dashed up it, angling his rifle to shoot anybody who might be hiding behind it. There was. Mackie instantly recognized the white band around the Marine’s hat and jerked his muzzle up before he shot him in the face.

  “Don’t shoot!” Mackie shouted at Orndoff.

  An enlisted referee was on his knees in front of Mackie. A major with a similar white band on his camouflage cover crouched behind him.

  “Damn, but you scared me!” the enlisted referee gasped. Sweat popped out on his face. Mackie knew the Marine had to be scared. Even though the Marines were firing blanks on this exercise, at the range he’d nearly shot the referee, the Marine would have been injured, possibly even blinded.