Operation Sierra-75

by Thomas S. Gressman

  “I don’t know, Gunny.” Taggart sighed. “I guess I’m just looking. If there is something I’m looking for, I suppose I’ll know it when I see it.”

  He squeezed past his subordinate and started aft. A few meters along the companionway, the Marines came to the life pods. Dr. Cortez was sitting wearily on the deck, her back against the bulkhead. She lifted her head slightly at the Marines’ approach, but sagged back against the steel wall and turned her head once she saw who it was. Dr. Grippo was leaning over Ensign Michelli’s inert form, studying a medical condition monitor.

  “How is he, Doc?” Taggart asked.

  “Looks like he’ll live, maybe, if we can nurse him along through the next few hours,” Grippo answered for his chief. Grippo’s tone was far less hostile than Cortez’s would have been. Still, it was somewhat lacking in warmth. “Will he recover? I don’t know. We have no way of knowing if he’s got brain damage.”

  “All right,” Taggart said mildly. “Will you keep us informed on his condition, Doctor?”

  “Harrumph.” Grippo let out a noncommittal snort.

  Taggart noted the hostility being aimed at him from the senior medical staff. He was well aware of the antagonism between Dr. Cortez and himself, but he had had no idea that the feelings were beginning to spread to the rest of the medical team. He looked at Cortez. Her posture convinced Taggart to discard any notion of approaching the doctor to hash out their differences.

  “Let’s go, Gunny.” With another frustrated sigh, the Marine captain jerked a thumb toward the ship’s aftersection.

  Cabot’s upper deck was worse than the lower. Here, crew quarters had been ransacked. Personal effects were strewn about the two gender-segregated cabins. As Taggart and Frost poked through the chaos of ripped clothing and shredded paper, they both noticed that neither one scrap of metal nor a single device more technologically advanced than a pencil remained in either of the living spaces.

  In the men’s berthing compartment, a thick smear of an alien’s purple blood defaced one wall. Beneath the smudge lay a hand-held long-range communicator, minus its power cell. The radio unit was likewise coated with dark, wine-colored flakes.

  Gunny Frost squatted on her hams and prodded the communicator with the muzzle of her shotgun.

  “Y’know, boss, I’ve seen a whole truckload of weird stuff since I’ve been in the Corps, but this is the weirdest. Why in the hell would the aliens cut themselves and smear blood all over everything?”

  “I don’t think they do, Onawa,” Taggart said, kneeling next to her to examine the communicator. “Remember the vids of the one that tried to steal Dade’s Pitbull? It had a belt buckle and a couple other bits of metal sort of implanted in its skin.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Well, do these things seem smart enough to you to do implant surgery?”

  “Not by a long way,” Frost said, looking thoughtfully at her commander.

  Taggart took a deep breath, hating the stale, rubbery taste of the air provided by his respirator.

  “This might seem a little weird. I don’t know if it’s even possible. Maybe Cortez or one of her medics could tell us, but right now, I don’t think they’d be too open to discussion. What if these aliens can somehow absorb things into their bodies?”

  “You’re right, sir, that’s weird.”

  “Yeah, but think about it for a minute. The Sovs don’t even put unit insignia on their mutants, yet these things have ‘trophies’ implanted in their bodies. That vid Dade took showed some sort of cable running into the creature’s body. We figured it was some kind of implant. What if those ugly bastards did the implants by . . . well . . . sort of ‘mashing’ the stuff into themselves?”

  Frost stared at her commanding officer while seconds bled away. “So, do you really think we’ve got a first-contact situation here?”

  Taggart nodded.

  Frost gave a rueful shake of her head. “So what are we gonna call ’em? Mashers?”

  “That isn’t in our department, Gunny, but ‘Mashers’ is as good a name as any, for now.”

  “What bothers me the most isn’t what to call these creatures, it’s more that they exist in the first place.” Taggart stood up, and adjusted the ride of his rifle’s assault sling. “When we were on the way here, we all studied the briefings about those other alien races, the Growlers, and the Zhykee, right? Then it was just a report, kinda like seeing a flying saucer, or a ghost. But this . . . this is proof. This makes it all real. This forces us to completely redefine reality. And worse, it suggests still more races. How many alien races are out there? How many are hostile? How long will it be before they discover Earth and pay us a visit?”

  Taggart stopped shaking his head at the possibilities he had just voiced.

  Frost sighed and pushed herself to her feet. She rested her shotgun across her shoulders, and said, “I don’t know, boss. The whole thing seems a little weird to me.”

  “So tell me, Onawa,” Taggart said with a bitter smile. “What part of the Maelstrom doesn’t seem weird to you?”

  “Huh,” Frost snorted. “I suppose you’re right. Let’s go take a look at the rest of the ship.”

  Immediately aft of Cabot’s crew quarters was the survey vessel’s galley and wardroom. Oddly, the wardroom, where the ship’s crewmen had taken their meals, had barely been touched by the looting aliens. The galley, on the other hand, was even more chaotic than the crew’s quarters. Every scrap of metal that was not part of the vessel itself had been taken from its proper place, smeared with the thick purple goo, and then tossed around the compartment as though in some orgiastic ritual.

  The room was too small for both environment-suited Marines, so Taggart stood guard in the corridor while Frost searched the disarrayed galley. As Frost poked through the wreckage, she stopped occasionally to prod some bit of cookware with the muzzle of her shotgun. Once or twice she squatted on her heels to get a closer look at some object that caught her attention.

  “You ready for another weirdness, boss?” she said, looking at her captain. “There isn’t a single knife or cleaver left in the whole place. Come to think of it, that isn’t so weird after all. The aliens have been stealing tools. I guess it only makes sense that they’d be stealing cooking knives, too.”

  Taggart shook his head in disgust, and beckoned Frost back into the companionway.

  “Let’s keep moving,” he said. “We haven’t got too many hours of daylight left. I’d like to finish searching the ship before nightfall. I’ve got a funny feeling the aliens might take another run at us in the dark.”

  * * *

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God.”

  Though she was not a Catholic, the words escaping Gunny Frost’s lips carried a tone of awe verging upon reverence.

  “Yeah,” Taggart seconded. “What a train wreck.”

  The Marines stood just inside Cabot’s engineering compartment, or rather what was left of it. The compartment that had once housed the survey vessel’s primary drives and power plant was nothing but a mass of twisted metal, burnt and melted plastics, and shattered composites. The room, which stretched the height of both of Cabot’s upper and lower decks, was sheared almost completely through two-thirds of the way back from the forward bulkhead. Along the huge rent in the ship’s skin, the hull plates and structural members were bent outward, as though from an explosion inside the engineering compartment. The after bulkhead of the engine room was likewise shattered, almost ripped away. The tattered metal that had once made up the partition between the engineering space and the compartment that actually housed the massive engines was held in place by only a few twisted metal I beams.

  Taggart crossed the room and shined his light through the rents in the after bulkhead. The portside engine (what he could see of the enormous drive unit) seemed to be intact, except for several head-sized holes in its outer casing. The starboard engine was gone. A gigantic hole yawned in the deck where it had been.

  “Y’know, boss? Back when I was ju
st a baby Marine, I was aboard a wet-navy cruiser, the Remagen,” Frost said as she flashed her light around the engine room. “We were in that action off Kamchatka. We took a Neo-Sov SS-N-25 in the hull just below the helipad. Missile penetrated the hull and detonated in the engineering spaces. Blew the hell out of the ship, started fires everywhere. The water was too cold to abandon ship, and there were no other vessels close enough to take us off, so we had to try to save her. We kept the old girl afloat for another six hours until the Porter came alongside to lend assistance. I was part of the team that went into the engine rooms after the fires were out. That’s just what this looks like, only here the damage is more contained. Almost as though the ship was hit by a smaller missile, like a SAM.”

  “You think the Sovs are building surface-to-space missiles, and testing them on this rock?” Taggart asked, noting a slight blanching of Frost’s ruddy complexion as she talked of her lost ship. “Or are you saying those things out there are smarter than they look and are building antispacecraft missiles on their own?”

  “I’m not really saying either, sir. It could just as easily been the Zhykee or the Pharon. All I’m saying is that it looks like Cabot was hit by a missile. I’m sure once Michelli wakes up, he’ll be able to clear things up for us.”

  “Yeah.” Taggart’s tone was skeptical.

  “Lion Six, this is Falcon.” Rick Dade’s voice cut into the conversation.

  “This is Six. Go ahead, Falcon.”

  “Boss, we found the bridge voice recorder. It was right where it was supposed to be, in the superstructure. The ship’s space frame is pretty badly twisted up here. I don’t think we’re gonna be able to unbolt it. Think you could send over a couple guys with a cutting torch?”

  “Can do, Falcon,” Taggart answered. “You sure you can cut it free without screwing up the recorder?”

  “That’s affirmative, sir.” Dade sounded as confident as always. “As long as the guys you send over know which end of the torch is up.”

  “Stand by, Falcon.” Taggart switched off the communicator. “Gunny? You got anybody who knows which end of a torch is up?”

  “Yessir,” Frost replied, and switched on her own communicator. After a few moments, she said to her commanding officer, “Sir, you can tell Dade I got a couple guys on the way.”

  “Falcon, Lion. You got a couple of guys heading your way. Please try not to shoot them.”

  “You got it, boss. Oh, Captain, there is no sign of the flight data recorder. We checked its compartment in the tail section, but it’s gone. Looks like it was hacked out of its mountings with a chisel and mallet.”

  “Very well, Falcon.” The captain touched a control, opening a general channel to his men. “Attention to orders. All Marines not specifically assigned to other duties are to begin a detailed search for Cabot’s flight data recorder. The operation is to be coordinated through Gunnery Sergeant Frost. Report to her in the cargo bay on the double. Lion Six, out.”

  “You really think we’re gonna find the recorder?” Frost asked.

  “I don’t know, Gunny,” he answered, massaging the back of his neck through the thick, environmentally sealed kevlon of his suit. “I hope so. I’m hoping it was ripped from its moorings by the crash and ejected from the hull. Then again, if that happened, it could be anywhere within two hundred kilometers of here. Or, if, as Dade suspects, it was removed from the superstructure, maybe whoever took it dropped it somewhere along the line, just like the rest of that junk out there in the debris field.”

  22

  * * *

  T aggart leaned carefully against the frame of Cabot’s sprung cargo bay door, lest a shard of the twisted, jagged metal tear his environment suit. The shadows had begun to deepen into night before he recalled his search teams. In twos and threes his men returned to the wrecked survey ship, all bearing the same report. No one had found the missing flight data recorder. Now only eight of his twenty-two troopers remained outside the vessel: four assigned to sentry duty, his scout team, Gunnery Sergeant Onawa Frost, and Corporal Tim Henry.

  As he stood staring at the gathering gloom, a slight scuffling noise reached his ears. He pushed himself away from the doorframe. As he turned toward the sound, his hands dropped to the Pitbull assault rifle hanging under his right arm from its combat sling. Before his fingers closed around the weapon’s firing grip, he located the source of the noise. Dr. Cortez had approached him, obviously with something on her mind. Whatever subject she had wanted to discuss had been driven from her mind by the sight of the M-18’s stubby flash suppressor lining up on her torso. Inside her environment suit’s closed visor, her eyes widened in surprise and fear.

  “Dammit, Doctor!” Taggart snapped the rifle’s muzzle up toward the bay’s overhead, away from her center-of-mass. “You ought to know better than to sneak up on a man like that.”

  “Madre de Dios,” Cortez lapsed into her native Spanish for the first time in the long weeks Taggart had known her. There was a distinct quaver in the whispered phrase. The blood had drained from her face, leaving it the color of old parchment, but only for a moment. Recovering quickly, she hid her shock behind a flat professional mien.

  “I just thought you’d like to know. Michelli is stable. It looks like we got here in time, but only just. He has good nerve responses in his extremities; his eyes are equally reactive to light. I don’t think there is brain damage, but until he wakes up, if he wakes up, we won’t know for certain.”

  “Very well. Anything else?”

  Cortez nodded. “I had a look at the bodies your men pulled from the ravine. Most of them look to have died of some kind of trauma. I don’t have the facilities here to do an autopsy. That will have to wait until we get back home.”

  “You said ‘most.’ What did the rest die from?” Taggart asked.

  “It looks like exposure to the atmosphere,” Cortez replied with a suppressed shudder. “The air on this planet is mostly carbon dioxide and ammonia. The dioxide accounts for the cyanosis and the ammonia would cause the inflammation of the tissues around the eyes and mouth. They died of a combination of suffocation and ammonia poisoning.”

  “What a hellish way to die,” Taggart said.

  “Do you think there is any good way to die, Captain?” Cortez snapped. Then her tone of voice softened. “Any luck in finding the missing men? Or their bodies?”

  “No,” Taggart said wearily. “Not a trace, and no sign of the flight data recorder, either.”

  He turned to look out into the swiftly falling darkness just in time to see the last four of his Marines returning to the ship. Gunny Frost shook her head. Taggart nodded and held up a finger, indicating that he wanted them to wait for a moment.

  “Doctor,” he said, turning his attention to the medical team leader, “we’re going to spend one more day searching this area for survivors and for that missing recorder. You and your team will bunk in the ship tonight. Set up your bivouac in the crew quarters on the upper deck. I don’t want any of your people wandering around the ship. Remember, I just about capped you when you came up on me unawares. I don’t want to get one of your medics greased by accident.”

  “Very well,” Cortez said in an oddly pleasant tone. It was almost as though she enjoyed agreeing with Taggart for once. “I was going to request another day before we returned to the shuttle anyway. Since we just got Michelli stable, I’d like to give him at least twenty-four hours to recover. Who knows? He may even regain consciousness by then.”

  “What are his chances?”

  “Of surviving? Assuming no further complications, ninety percent,” Cortez answered after a moment’s thought. “Of making a full recovery? Fifty-fifty. The sooner we get him into the Gallatin’s sick bay, the better his chances are going to be. But what about your Marines, Captain? They’ve got to be exhausted.”

  Cortez’s sudden and unwonted concern startled Taggart. He put it down to fatigue, and a genuine concern for the welfare of his men. As much as a pain in the neck as Cortez could b
e on more “political” subjects, Taggart realized that the doctor would exert every effort on the behalf of the men and women under her care.

  “They probably are exhausted,” he admitted. “We’re gonna bivouac here in the cargo bay. We’ll rotate sentries in and out through the night. That’s why I want your people to stay on the upper deck. If they go wandering around the ship, they’re liable to be mistaken for hostiles and get themselves shot.”

  “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

  “Yes, Doctor, there is. The upper deck is going to be the most secure area of the ship. You and your people will be safest there, in case those critters decide to come back tonight.”

  “All right, Captain,” Cortez agreed. “I’ll pass your orders along to my people.”

  As soon as the doctor made her way forward, and out of the bay, Taggart turned to the Marines.

  “Okay, Gunny, let’s have it.”

  “Nothing, sir, not a goddamn thing. We went through the debris field as best we could with the daylight we had left. We found a lot of junk, and about half of it had that dried purple blood stuff on it. But no data recorder.” Frost jerked a thumb at Corporal Henry. “Tim here took a couple of guys back along the valley about a klick or so, following the gouge Cabot made in the ground when she skidded in.”

  “That’s right, boss. We found lots of junk, bits of hull plating, pieces of structural members, even a piece of what might have been a control jet.” The tall, prematurely gray-haired Marine shrugged. “But no sign of the black box.”

  “How about you, Dade?” Taggart asked.

  “Nothing, sir, just like Gunny said.” The scout shrugged, with a note of bitterness in his voice. “If it had just been Krista and me moving down here, we might have been able to find something. But you’ve had twenty Marines and a dozen medics stomping all over the area. Every time we picked up a decent trail, it only ran a few meters before some clodhopping character wiped it out. We went out a ways farther, maybe two hundred, two hundred fifty meters. Picked up a couple of decent trails, but they lead in all different directions. It was getting too dark to follow any of them. We marked them. If you like, we can start tracking the bad guys in the morning.”