Into the Maelstrom

by Loren L. Coleman

  “Get us to shore, Jorgie.” He broke from the captain’s wintry gaze, again searching the darkness as if he might detect any hidden threat to his command. “Just get us to shore.”

  * * *

  Clouds rolled away on a sharp northerly wind, opening the sky back up to a brilliant field of stars. The early dawn of extreme northern lands was still a good hour away, touching the southeastern horizon with only the dimmest light. The bulk of the Seventy-first Assault Group, unofficially known as Raymond’s Rangers for their CO’s former career in special forces, was drawn into its two columns awaiting orders to move. Pickets established a safety perimeter at two kilometers. Nearby, a small wooded stand grew up from a shallow, bowl-shaped depression, probably fed and kept alive by a hot springs. Everywhere else, one saw arctic plains and low, rolling hills covered by scrub and short, straw-colored grasses. Nothing to indicate trouble.

  You think we have a similar problem?

  Fredriksson’s question continued to haunt Sainz, the more so as scouts sent to recon the deployment zone reported back their qualified “all clears.” No Neo-Sov forces. No remote-detection equipment. The huge Leviathans had departed after depositing their charges on the north Siberian tundra, removing the greatest risk for accidental detection of his command. And topside brass had promised a window in the coverage by Neo-Soviet internal-security satellites. It should have left him feeling as secure as he might be in enemy territory.

  What had him uneasy was the specimen he held in his hands and the oddity he was kneeling next to. One of the scouts had brought him this sample of petrified scrub. Though neither botanist nor geologist, Sainz still recognized its inexplicable nature. This was not a sample of vegetation turned rock over centuries of fossilization. Its twisted length was fully intact, from evergreen needles to a full root system, as if turned to stone in an instant’s time. Dirt still clung between petrified tendrils of the rootstock. The pathfinder had reported finding an entire field of them, as had other scouts. One also claimed to have seen a plant that looked spun from glass, though it had shattered at his touch.

  Sainz preferred to believe the latter another manifestation of this strange petrifaction process. He had enough of the bizarre to deal with already in that the stones he knelt over also defied immediate explanation. Salted over the ground for hundreds of meters, glossy smooth like obsidian, they glowed with a lustrous emerald sheen. Pebbles to the size of a man’s head. Slightly warm to the touch. At first the Union troops had worried over intense radiation or some new chemical threat—CBR was always a primary concern—but the unit’s ChemBioRad experts quickly confirmed that the area was clean. Or as clean as one could expect in Neo-Soviet territory. No reason to worry.

  Still, they had taken samples for later study. And Sainz remembered the footnote attached to the Eyes Only report from United Africa—the strange mineral deposits and “unexplained biological damage” noted by investigators at the Novo Cocarada site. It left him with concerns of his own for the safety of his people.

  Footsteps scuffed the ground behind him. “I have the juniors assembled at the trailer,” said Major Rebecca Howard, his XO. Her voice was rough from years of shouting commands but not altogether unpleasant. Short and compact, she wore her long, wheat-colored hair in a single braid sealed in place with a special wrap when on duty. She toed at one of the glowing stones with the rough tread of her combat boot, flipping it over. It had rested in a slight depression, as a natural stone would, but came away clean of any earth.

  “Not still worried about these rad-stones, are you?” she asked.

  “They’re not rad-stones,” Sainz told her.

  Howard shrugged uneasily, then breathed on her ungloved hands to warm her fingers against the Siberian chill. “Then why did the CBR boys make a point of bagging them in lined satchels?” She flicked the bulge made by the personal dosimeter sewn into a pocket of her fatigues, a passive detector that would be read after the mission to estimate her personal radiation dosage.

  “We’ll know later, of course, but I’ll bet we’re off combat duty for a year after this one. And I’ve read of similar effects. The Neo-Sovs pasted a lot of real estate with neutron bombs over the last century—I hear some rocks in China are still glowing, even from the sites hit back in ought-nine.”

  Sainz ran a hand back through his short dark hair. “Sure, sometimes we see a glow of white or even reddish orange. But never green.” He shook his head. “And never this far north. Why aim a strike up here?” He gestured to the open tundra.

  “No,” he said, rising to his feet, “this is something else. Except for when they flattened Novosibirsk to put an end to General Matirov’s four-hour rebellion, they never walked a neutron device north of Sayan Khrebet.” Seeing Rebecca’s frown, he gave her the translated name of Sayan Mountain Range.

  Her frown deepened. Sainz knew that some officers resented his mastery of languages, which included several dialects of Russian.

  “So a power-plant meltdown, then,” she said. “They’ve enough of those in the region. Or maybe it’s something new. Will you allow it to hold up the mission? Sir?” She blinked rapidly, then looked down at one of the glowing emerald green stones on the ground.

  Sainz smiled thinly at the implied rebuke. Rebecca Howard was as good an exec as he could hope for, and usually she kept her animosity buried. Her home state of Texas was, after all, a reluctant member of the Union. Texas supported the old American states above all, tolerating the Canadians but looking down on the equal status given Mexico. Many Texans barely concealed their hostility when speaking to those they considered inferior. In four years and eleven combat assignments, Major Howard had never allowed that bias to interfere with her duty. That it did now revealed her nervousness, whether or not she would admit to it. The colonel let her challenge slide. Everyone’s nerves were stretched taut.

  “This mission won’t be held up, Major Howard. For anything. Let’s hit the trailer and put on our show for the juniors.”

  His nod got her going, but Sainz remained a moment longer, still holding the piece of petrified scrub amid the field of glowing stones. He looked around him at this disturbing place one last time, then knew he had to be on his way as well. He hadn’t revealed to Howard the changes he was making to the mission’s deployment. He would save that for the trailer.

  And that would save any discussion for much later.

  The Hades command glider was the unit’s most advanced vehicle. It was smaller than the Hydra troop transport, packed with an incredible amount of communications and sensor equipment as well as a turret-mounted light rail gun. Its angular body, like that of the Hydra, incorporated a healthy measure of stealth capability, especially when charged with the signal-dampening field. Antigravity fields were stronger, allowing it to run smoothly over very rough ground, and it packed an improved thrust-to-weight ratio. Able to outrun any other vehicle deployed by the Seventy-first, it was still referred to as the trailer because Union tactical doctrine always placed command transports near the rear of any column. A dozen men and women gathered around the grounded Hades, waiting for their commanding officers. Waiting for the show.

  The show was part procedure, part superstition—like most military traditions and protocols, Sainz suspected. The Seventy-first had been well briefed before departure, of course. But operational guidelines recommended a refresh for junior officers and senior enlisted personnel once a unit hit its deployment zone. It was crucial that everyone set the same foot forward when leaving the DZ. Sainz and Howard had, over four years together, honed their routine to a fine edge. Each knew which questions to field and how to play off the other’s comments.

  The assembled soldiers came to attention, saluting as Howard and Sainz walked up to the command vehicle. All faced Colonel Sainz as they did so, except for one sergeant who turned away just enough to hint at a rebelliousness without being called on improper honors.

  The two officers stopped just short of the group, and Sainz flipped a quick salute ba
ck to the assemblage for the both of them. Rebecca Howard nodded, and said, “Stand easy.” The seven junior officers relaxed, arms folded across chests or leaning up against the Hades. The senior sergeants present fell into easy parade-rest stance, except for one of them who slouched back against the command vehicle.

  Howard led off. “You know the drill. Intel has placed a Neo-Sov weapons facility in the plateau region southeast of our DZ. It’s our one and only target this run.”

  “Chernaya Gora—the Black Mountain—is not turning out standard arms,” Sainz said, giving the Neo-Soviet name, and its translation, for the facility. “We aren’t worried about another few thousand chem-sprayers or Kalashnikov rifles. Black Mountain has its own liquid-metal fast-breeder reactor and is fully capable of nuclear-weapons production. Very likely it houses facilities for chemical and biological weapons, as well as any prototype weapons of mass destruction.”

  “Like the Angola blast device, Colonel-sir?” This from Sergeant Tom Tousley, the senior sergeant leaning casually against the command transport. Carefully disrespectful, as his earlier salute had also been. “That is why we’re here, isn’t it, Colonel-sir?” Tom Tousley was a Texan like Rebecca Howard, but he was everything she was not when it came to proper conduct. Tousley was the one who had dubbed the Seventy-first the wetback brigade the day Sainz formally accepted command. That comment had cost him a rocker stripe, administrative punishment, and his position as command master sergeant.

  Sainz might have bounced him all the way back to the Union Army Replacement Department, except for Howard’s personal intervention and the sergeant’s record. The fact remained that Tousley, for his one major fault, possessed skills Raymond Sainz needed. He was a man willing to do whatever it took to get the job done.

  Fortunately for the continued preservation of Tousley’s rank, Howard did an excellent job of reining him in and keeping any discipline unofficial and off the record.

  “I don’t want to hear chow-hall rumors about what may or may not have happened in Angola,” she told the group, “and how that might influence our mission. Or whether it does. Or whether it should. United Africa released its statement, basically explaining nothing. The press printed some slanted supposition, but even less in the way of fact. So, end of file. We’re here,” she said harshly, giving Tousley a hard stare, “to end a very real threat to the Union.” She waited until Tousley dropped his gaze, conceding the point.

  Sainz nodded support for his exec. He also had an idea of what victory might mean in the larger scheme of things, though he couldn’t share such thoughts, not even with Howard. The Siberian lowlands were considered the Neo-Soviets’ greatest weakness. It was an immense, sparsely populated territory, through which an enemy army could hope to move undetected. Which was exactly what the Seventy-first proposed to do. An army that could gain access to the Kirghiz Steppe could then swing south of the Urals, with all of the empire’s southwest lowlands left wide-open. Take out or hold Moscow, Kiev, and Donetsk, disrupt or destroy Gorki, Kuybyshev, and Sverdlovsk, and you paralyzed the Neo-Soviet empire. China breaks away first, likely followed by what was left of Korea and then Japan. Sainz had heard it called the Siberian gutshot.

  “Chernaya Gora should be in or around Gory Putorana,” he said, returning to the briefing and identifying the mountainous region they would be searching. “This puts us in the neighborhood of Noril’sk. That city’s our biggest threat, since the Neo-Soviets maintain three decent task forces there under competent commanders. If even one takes the field against us, we’ll know we’ve been in a fight.”

  “The Putorana area,” Rebecca Howard said, stumbling only slightly over the unfamiliar name, “is not too unlike the Four Corners region, if a bit smaller and taiga versus high desert. Still, I expect our training on the Colorado Plateau should pay off. You’ll see similarities. A good variation of temperatures between night and day, though this time of year it shouldn’t dip into freezing. There are forested areas that can hide us from the Neo-Sovs. And a lot of deep canyons where the Black Mountain facility can hide from us.”

  Staring off slightly south of east, Sainz estimated by the brightening sky that less than thirty minutes remained before the north’s long day began. Time to broach the changes, and get the Seventy-first’s twin columns moving. He drew a deep breath of the chill air.

  “Because we’ve already seen a few minor surprises,” he said, alluding to the curious discoveries made by the scouts, “every pathfinder patrol will be backed by a combat squad.” Howard hid her surprise well. Only a slight tensing of the shoulders gave her away, though the semirigid padding of her field uniform hid most of that. “I want our people covered.”

  Only Sergeant Tousley looked ready to take issue with the idea. Sainz had expected as much—the change meant combat squads would be pulling extra duty.

  Howard headed off any problems by saying, “You give the pathfinders room to operate. Don’t crowd. You’re there for support, in case things go wrong. Not to make them go wrong.” Whether or not she agreed with the change, she certainly made it sound as if the idea had earned her full support.

  And Raymond Sainz knew when to take an advantage and leave well enough alone. Down to the hard sell. “We know the signs when the Neo-Soviet empire is feeling bellicose. They haven’t varied too much since the zero-nine invasion of China. They escalate, stockpile, and threaten. And then burn a good portion in one massive strike. We’ve held them off every time it’s come our way. This time we hope to stop them during the escalation phase. Taking out Chernaya Gora will do that.”

  “And,” Rebecca reminded them, “if we’re caught before we finish the job, it might just drive them straight into their strike. So stay alert; on your toes and by the numbers. Here’s where we prove the Seventy-first Assault Group is a cut above the rest.”

  A good end to the show, Sainz decided. He nodded, once and finally. “Dismissed,” he said.

  As the juniors headed off to their various posts, Sainz did not move from his spot alongside the Hades. “We’ll talk under way,” Howard promised, then she, too, left to make one last check of the columns.

  Sainz had no doubt of that. If he was a bit more cautious, it was because he knew more of the report on the Angola incident and how some of the African phenomena compared with these local oddities. He also had a better idea of what was at stake on the mission, though first he had to prove that a large force could operate under stealth in the taiga lands of Siberia. And since that test directly impacted on the survival of his command, he ranked it fairly high. So far, at least, nothing seemed to stand in the way.

  It was a thought Raymond Sainz hoped would not come back to haunt him.

  3

  * * *

  A s the airlock processors continued pushing Mars’s thin atmosphere aside for a Terran-norm mixture, Brygan Vassilyevich Nystolov peeled himself out of his environment suit. “Brygan the Bear” never waited for full atmosphere or the heated changing rooms. Didn’t have to.

  He quickly broke the hard seal down the chest of his protective suit and shrugged it off his wide shoulders. Made from a dark material backed by an insulated liner of silver-gray fabric, the suit clung to him like a second skin. Where he pulled it away, the sub–zero Centigrade temperature stabbed through his undergarment.

  Ignoring the air’s freezing touch, he hiked the suit down to his thickset waist. This freed the wide neck skirting attached to his helmet, the thin material covering his shoulders and good portions of his chest and back. He’d designed the suit himself to be a system of overlapping folds in order to be free of the maddeningly rigid helmet collars most suffered when suited for Mars’s hostile environment. The helmet and skirt came away easily, his beard rasping against the suit’s inner insulation.

  He cradled the headgear in the crook of one well-muscled arm and tucked the skirting up into the bowl of the helmet. Doing so, he caught a glimpse of his own face in the helmet’s reflective bowl; dark eyes almost black, set in a red-tanned face frame
d by dark bushy hair and trimmed beard.

  Drawing a deep breath of the cold, thin air, Brygan curled his lip at the trace odor of stale sweat so typical of Neo-Soviet bases on Mars. It spoke too easily of an overtaxed scrubber system and the press of bodies in close quarters so common in the Mars colonies. He would know, his duties as scout and surveyor having taken him to every outpost many times over. Some he liked better than others, the ones where he had room to get away by himself. But this one, the Baskurgan cliffside base on the lower slopes of Ascraeus Mons, was bad. The main control center for Mars operations, its narrow corridors connected deep warrens crowded with Neo-Soviet military.

  The insulated gloves finally came off, and he clipped them to his belt after brushing a wispy cloud of red fines from the dark material. The airlock’s inner door cycled open, and Brygan glided forward in a stride he had perfected for the two-fifths standard gravity of Mars. Though still half-undressed and carrying his helmet with him, he bypassed the changing rooms. Some officers frowned at his appearance on the lift up to command levels, but no one bothered him. No one ever did.

  Down a long corridor, and then into the chaos of Mars control. Computer stations packed the room wall to wall, the colored wash from their screens providing better illumination than the dim overhead lights. The room felt electrically charged from all the equipment. Operators and military men worked their way along the narrow aisles between stations, looking distracted as they compared data and argued. Brygan frowned. When technicians and the military were distracted, that left no one in control.

  Almost no one.

  He spotted General Vladimir Leonov near the plex wall, hands clasped behind his back, staring through the thick, transparent material to the violent landscape beyond. The outside floodlights washed enough light back in to show the general’s iron gray crew cut and uniform outline. The large man wore his officer’s trench, a rigid-armor vest with ballistic cloth falling in straight lines from the waist.