“Here now!” Franks blustered. “The deal is already struck. No reneging!”
Vardell raised a hand. “I won’t, don’t worry about that. You’ll be aboard that shuttle. But... the Lieutenant has made good points. I think we will do it her way and after a brief,” she emphasised that point when Franks started to argue. “A brief recon of the ship, you’ll join the marines and Captain Stone to continue the mission. If hostilities break out, your pilot will have orders to hightail it back here with you.”
Franks scowled.
“And my mission?” Fuentez asked.
“As you said. You go down solo and check it out, and the rest of your team will wait for your report.”
Fuentez nodded and the vipers exchanged satisfied smiles.
Colgan watched them, fascinated. They were obviously in communication with each other though they remained silent. The expressions flashing upon their faces all through the briefing suggested they had been discussing ways to bend things in the direction they desired without overtly doing so. He wondered what other vipers were doing behind the scenes throughout the Alliance, but dismissed the thought. Here was all that mattered.
“So,” he said. “If we’re done here, I think we should adjourn for food. The shuttles leave early tomorrow. Lieutenant Fuentez?”
“Sir?”
“I assume you’ll prefer a night approach?”
“Absolutely. I’ll pilot the shuttle myself and land at a distance. I want to hike in.”
“Then you’ll need to leave at 0400 hours local.”
“Understood.”
With that everyone stood and the meeting broke up. Louise and the others attending by holo disappeared and the room suddenly felt less full.
* * *
27 ~ Hostile Territory
Aboard Shuttle, Approaching Unnamed Planet
Gina’s mission began like many she had undertaken with a long boring wait, but unlike those other times, she was actually progressing the op during the long hours with nothing to do; her shuttle was powered down on a ballistic course designed not to attract Leviathan’s attention as she approached her objective. She was all in favour of not being noticed. It was a tense few hours, heading for the planet with no real idea if she was being tracked by Merki sensors. The fear of that had faded now; Leviathan was in geosynch and the orbit had progressed to a point where her shuttle was now approaching with the entire planet between them. The good news was that she was safe from detection; the bad news was that she would have a long flight in atmosphere to get on station and begin her recon mission.
She was content with that.
Gina wondered what the others would discover on the massive ship when they launched. What new thing would they find to plague the Alliance? That’s how she felt about the Merkiaari after the Shan campaign. They were a plague upon the galaxy and Humanity in particular; a scourge that needed eradicating. Everyone loathed and feared them of course. The physical scars of the last war had mostly healed, though there were still some planets with ruins where cities of millions once stood, but the psychological scars never would. Humanity’s psyche had been irreversibly scarred, changed as a result of its very first contact with aliens. Nothing would ever give them back that sense of innocence they’d had as they explored the galaxy and found it good. They knew now it wasn’t good; it was a cold-hearted bitch, and to survive in it they needed to fight as hard as they ever had on Earth. Harder. There were no free lunches and they had serious competition in the Merki. That was something they’d never really had on the homeworld.
The shuttle shivered ever so slightly, encountering the outermost but still diffuse layers of the atmosphere. Gina brought her attention back to her instruments and prepared to take manual control. She could wish for Harbinger’s neural interfaces about now. Flying her had been a dream, exactly like one in fact when she thought about it. Neural controls were great when you got the hang of them. Of course the learning curve was steep. It was so easy to lose concentration and be thrown out of the gestalt; abruptly dropping out of the net that way could actually hurt and it was always disorientating. One moment you were a powerful entity with a fusion heart, the next a tiny meat sack confused and alone again in your own head.
The shuttle shuddered again and her wings bit into atmosphere, but her control surfaces had nothing to work with at this altitude. Working the stick like stirring a pot of stew, she felt for the first indications that she had control. Less than a minute later she felt it, and eased the shuttle onto a new course as she hammered deeper into the soup that this planet laughingly called an atmosphere. She had to fly on instruments; cloud cover was extensive. According to weather radar and other sensors she would be flying through some heavy storms on her way to the objective.
She took the shuttle down to 5000 meters and set the autopilot before daring to release control again. Flight time would be a few hours at current speed, but that was meaningless. She couldn’t fly directly there and land; this was a recon mission. Her plan was to find a hidden landing site and hike in to the objective. No one knew what to expect, and that applied to environmental conditions as much as it did to the Merki. A Merkiaari city hidden under the clouds would be at the top of her not good list though. Gina grinned at the thought. Scary thought or not, she was excited too. She wanted to know what this planet was hiding as much as James and his colleagues did.
Stone’s mission had different objectives, but both were important. She wouldn’t know anything until a satellite was deployed over the planet; that wouldn’t happen until he checked out Leviathan and satisfied everyone it was no threat. Gina was going to assume the ship was abandoned by the crew and that they were down here. If she was wrong, well, it meant she was wasting her time but safe. If she was right, any precautions she took to remain hidden would be good ones.
The shuttle flew through the storm front and into the worst storm she had ever experienced, and she had been transported through a few in her time as a marine. She hadn’t been a pilot until trained on Snakeholme by the regiment’s ace instructors, but she knew a bad blow when confronted by one. She wasn’t enjoying her first solo op in bad weather. Not at all. The shuttle was bucking and lurching in the severe turbulence; the first time it lost 1000 meters in altitude without warning she nearly barfed, and her heart hammered in panic as she reached for the controls, but the autopilot was unfazed. The engines howled and the computers made an adjustment to compensate. If she went down at this speed nothing would save her. Enhancements be damned, the old adage—it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop—was entirely apt viper or not.
Hours of hell later found her hovering in torrential rain trying to land without crashing. She had discovered the handy dandy river gorge while looking for somewhere to land, and realised what a treasure she had found. The gorge was deep and it weaved its way through the landscape wider than any highway; she used it like one to fly much closer to her objective than originally planned. It would really cut down on the time she needed to get in position, and all without being seen. The downside had been the storm; the wind had really been something trapped between rock walls. Wind shear and strong updraughts could be fun when you couldn’t see them coming... yeah right. She had been scared shitless more than once. It had certainly made the final leg of the flight interesting.
Now here she was, hovering a few metres above the ground on anti-grav thrusters, unable to cross that final barrier. It was ridiculous! She had come all this way but couldn’t land! The winds had picked up until she would have called the storm a tropical one, but it really wasn’t quite as bad as a hurricane, maybe. Besides, it was too damn cold to be called tropical. There was nowhere warm enough on the entire planet for that name to apply. It was almost enough to make her feel sorry for any Merki trapped here. Almost. She remembered all the faces she would never see again because of them, and suddenly she felt remarkably cheerful.
Screw ’em.
Gusts of wind howled through the gorge, driving th
e rain horizontally against the fuselage, threatening to drive her sideways into the cliff. She compensated, leaning the shuttle into the wind and deployed the landing skids. Suddenly the wind dropped and she was skidding sideways. She cursed and over corrected as another blast of wind drove her toward the cliff again. She took a chance, slammed the shuttle down the last few meters, and a horrible crunching groan told her the starboard skid had found a rock. The shuttle lurched at an angle to port with its butt in the air, propped awkwardly on an outcropping. She gave her anti-grav just a little power, not enough to lift fully and dragged the skid away from the obstruction. She winced at the terrible noise it made, hoping she hadn’t ripped the sucker off, but then using her VTOL joystick she carefully tried to land again. To her vast relief, the shuttle seemed to accept this and didn’t protest further. The landing was almost smooth this time, though its attitude wasn’t ideal. The ground was far from level. The shuttle still had its butt in the air and was leaning to port, but the ground seemed stable. She waited for disaster to strike, for the landing strut to fall off or for the shuttle to slip further down slope, but nothing of the sort occurred.
“Well, that was fun.” She blew a lock of hair out of her eyes. She needed a trim. “I guess we don’t need anti-grav anymore then.”
It was surprisingly hard to let her death grip on the stick go, but she did it finally and started the power down sequence, listening all the while to the shuttle settling on its skids. She willed it not to make any sudden moves. It didn’t, but she had no confidence in the ground hereabouts. She hadn’t chosen the site because it was a good one for landing shuttles in. She’d chosen it because it was sheltered by an overhang on the cliff wall where in the far past water had eroded the rock below. She judged the river running through the gorge was not navigable and the cliff walls were high. It would be hard for anyone to see the shuttle from above and there was no reason for anyone to attempt a descent. Of course that meant it wouldn’t be too easy for her to ascend the cliff either, but she had climbed worse with Kate on Snakeholme. She had everything in her pack that she needed. She’d get it done.
The real benefit of following the gorge and flying within it for the last few klicks was that, despite how dangerous the wind shear and updraughts had been, it allowed her to approach her objective far closer than she could possibly have hoped for. Yes, there was still going to be a bit of climbing and hiking involved, but she’d known there would be before she began. Another more shuttle friendly landing site would have involved a longer hike and would have delayed her mission far longer. If it weren’t for the damn weather, she would have called this an extremely good start to the mission. As it was, she was hampered but not stopped by conditions. It wouldn’t be fun out there, but no one said being a viper would always be fun. Actually, she had found it to be more fun than not all things considered, but the principle stood.
She finished up in the cockpit and adjourned to the cabin to get ready.
Her pack had everything she could possibly want in it for a long recon mission. She had food and water, plenty of ammo just in case, and a one man waterproof survival bag—viper issue but no different to the ones she’d used in the Corps. Considering the conditions, she was very happy to have it. She had pretty much everything she could think of except an autochef, all tightly packed into every available space. There wasn’t a millimetre left to spare and she didn’t mess with its contents now. On the outside of the pack, she had rope, plenty of carabiners, a good selection of pitons, and various sizes of SLCs (spring loaded cams) all hanging from loops attached to it.
She pulled on wet weather gear over her armour and checked her rifle. She wasn’t here to fight, but there was no way that she was breathing the same air as Merki without her pistol on her hip and rifle in her hands. She holstered her pistol and secured it; she didn’t want it falling out on the climb. Lastly, with a nod to the weather and the nasty things it could do to the induction coil in the barrel of her rifle, she taped a food packet over the muzzle. She was a fiend for chorizo flavoured chips; the empty packet was coming in handy now. There were loops on her pack for her rifle. She secured it and pulled on her helmet before heading for the hatch.
Rain and wind blasted into the cabin. Her helmet and rain gear kept her comfortable. She climbed down and locked the hatch before taking a look around. It was night and if not for the storm the moons would probably have revealed her to nosy Merkiaari—if any were willing to brave the weather. She was hoping they weren’t. Sensors were trawling for anything worthy of notice, but the gorge was mostly barren rock. Earth and vegetation had long since been eroded away by bad weather and floods. Sensors reported no threats detected, and no electronic emissions either. She switched to light amplification mode and colours bled away until she viewed the world in monochrome. It would make her footing and climbing easier. She set up her sensors on a constant rotation looking for threat or comm chatter, and flagged motion as a priority. A quiet stealthy hostile should still show up on motion sensors. She made certain that her processor would trip an alert should anything at all attract its attention. She was feeling a bit paranoid.
So sue me.
At the cliff face she studied the problem. The rock was limestone and sandstone layers, deposited in the geologic past. No doubt a sea had covered the area and had left its sediment to become rock that later had been eroded by the river to create the gorge. It should be relatively easy to climb, she judged. If not for the weather, she might have been tempted to free climb. Her enhancements made that an easy matter here; there were plenty of holds to use, but the wind and rain would turn an easy climb into a challenging one, and she had no right to risk her life upon something not mission critical. She would use the gear she had brought.
She tied her pack to the end of her rope to let her haul it up later and got to work. She transferred her carabiners, cams, and rock hammer to her belt, before setting her first cam above her head and tugging it roughly. Good.
Up she went.
Gina didn’t consider the time or the danger as she worked her way up. There was only rock and the next hold. Halfway up she paused and anchored herself to haul up her pack. She could have left it until the very top, but this way was better. It gave her access to her stuff, especially her rifle, but more importantly it lessened the risk of snagging. She used a narrow shelf to store it before coiling the rope and continuing up. The cams were excellent kit; so easy to use, any fool could climb this cliff with ease. Just look at her. Her thing, if she could be said to have a thing, was boats not climbing. Sailboats preferably, but she found enjoyment in any kind that floated. White water canoeing, sailing... she was a water baby.
Eric had enjoyed their time on Snakeholme’s seas. That hadn’t been much of a challenge though. A modern yacht could sail itself, literally. Everything from raising and lowering the sails to navigation could be automated with a flick of a switch. She had flicked that switch alright; straight to manual and spent some quality time teaching Eric how to sail old school. He had seemed to enjoy himself, though his thing had once been flying or so he said. He hadn’t done any for decades. In fact, she got the impression he hadn’t done much of anything for decades except work. That wasn’t healthy. She remembered Sebastian’s comments about what he had found in Eric’s head. The A.I. said that he was constantly fighting old battles.
Anyway, he had enjoyed learning how to sail, and she had promised him that someday she would let him teach her atmospheric surfing, something he had once been into apparently. It sounded like a crazy thing to do, but she knew it was a popular sport, and she had some jump training already; the regiment had nothing but time on its hands and used it to train vipers in everything it could think of. One day she might need to jump out of a perfectly good troop transport onto a Merkiaari installation she supposed, though why she couldn’t just ride into battle aboard an APC she didn’t know. Besides, knowing how to handle a chute didn’t hurt anything whether she used it or not.
Some pitons and ham
mering later she was near the cliff top. She paused there letting her sensors give her an image of what she would find above. The rain was lashing down and the wind howling, but none of that affected her. She had anchored herself solidly to well planted pitons just below the edge. She hauled up her pack while her sensors filled in her map. Windows open on her display detailed her surroundings; one displayed an infrared picture of what lay ahead. There wasn’t much to see. The rain cooled everything down to the ambient temperature, making it pretty much useless right now, but she didn’t dismiss its output. Animals would be much warmer and very visible if they were out there; Merkiaari too, unless they took steps to lower their IR. She was banking upon the other window more to warn her of anything moving her way. Motion sensors could use different outputs, but she preferred visual over audio. Always had, even back in the Corp. where all she’d had was her helmet.
Motion sensor output was designed to mimic a display probably more at home in a fighter’s cockpit. It resembled a radar scope in a lot of ways, but instead of revealing weather fronts or incoming aircraft, it revealed movement; all kinds of movement depending on sensitivity settings. She could dial it way up and discover insects burrowing nearby, or dial it down until a dinosaur passing right in front of her nose would be ignored. She had it set so that anything moving fast would be flagged despite its size, but she also had it set up to reveal slow movers bigger than a house cat. She didn’t expect pets on the rampage, but she’d been on planets with some pretty strange wildlife in her time. You never knew what might try to eat you in this crazy universe.
Satisfied that all was clear up top, and that the woods and undergrowth weren’t hiding a Merkiaari death squad waiting to nail her butt, she pulled herself up the final meter and onto level ground again. The ground was muddy, the undergrowth sparse close to the edge. She buried her fingers in the muck and encountered rock just a few centimetres below the surface. Not surprising the vegetation was stunted hereabouts. Compared with the jungles of Thurston these were barely trees at all. Call them shrubs when compared to the Goliaths of the Shan worlds. The trees there were awesome in stature, very tall with heavy foliage. These, though numerous, didn’t compare favourably. She was no scientist, but she had a feeling that arboreal wildlife wouldn’t be dominant here.
Merkiaari Wars: 04 - Operation Breakout Page 34
