Solfleet: The Call of Duty

by Smith, Glenn

  The overhead lighting changed from its normal soft blue-white to a not too bright blood red, startling Dylan from his reverie. “Coming up on insertion point,” the pilot announced over the intercom.

  “On your feet!” the lieutenant called out from the front of the cabin.

  Dylan and the eight men and four women who comprised his squad stood up and faced forward, forming two columns, and conducted a final check of their weapons and equipment. Then they fastened their oxygen masks into place and gave the lieutenant a thumbs-up signal as soon as they were ready.

  “Man the capsules,” the young officer ordered.

  The black-clad commandos moved to the port and starboard sides of the shuttle and squeezed into their seven foot tall, matte-black, torpedo-shaped drop capsules. As the hatches closed, the lieutenant stepped up and checked each capsule’s pressure gauge to verify the integrity of the seal.

  As squad sergeant, Dylan climbed into his capsule last, as soon as the lieutenant gave him the go-ahead with a single nod. Once inside he reached up and grasped the rubber handles at the periphery of his vision and the hatch immediately dropped into place and sealed him in. Then he pushed the toes of his boots against the plastisteel stops and locked his feet into the bindings. Seconds later the lieutenant appeared just beyond the narrow viewport, verifying the seal, just as he had done for the others.

  “Good luck, Sergeant,” he said over the comm-link.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The lieutenant looked him in the eye—not an easy thing to do, considering how narrow that little viewport really was. “We’ll be there if you need us.”

  “I’m depending on it, sir.” And he knew, somehow, that he could.

  “Everyone goes home.” With that, the lieutenant stepped away.

  A deafening silence filled the capsule. As he waited, Dylan imagined he could hear his own heart beating. Or was he really hearing it? He could never be quite sure. He could feel it pounding hard against his chest as if it were trying to escape. That was certainly real enough.

  He drew a deep breath to try to relax, but the cabin lighting changed again at that same moment, this time from red to amber, and the pounding continued unabated. The flight engineer was slowly depressurizing the cabin. “I knew I should’ve joined the Aerospace Force,” he said aloud, just as he always did right before a drop.

  And just like his predecessor before him, the new lieutenant pointed out, “I don’t know what you’re bitching about, Sergeant. You’re already flying, and you’re about to solo.”

  “Yes, sir. Straight down, sir,” he answered back, completing the ritual.

  Moments later, amber changed to green. Then, about every three seconds or so, the floor plate vibrated beneath Dylan’s feet. Locking clamps were disengaging and the stealth-tech capsules were being jettisoned in pairs through their launch tubes. The vibrations grew stronger each time until Dylan’s stomach suddenly leapt into his mouth. Were it not for the boot bindings holding him down, he would have come off the floor and struck his head.

  Just as normal procedure dictated that the squad sergeant always be the last to climb into his capsule, it also dictated that he be the last to drop. That way he could count off those launch vibrations and know whether or not all the other capsules had jettisoned without any problems. It was a philosophy Dylan disagreed with—he’d always believed a leader should lead the way, not bring up the rear—but it was what it was. The Corps hadn’t consulted him when it wrote up its doctrine and his personal disagreement with it didn’t mean squat to anyone.

  This time the capsules had all launched successfully, thank God—he needed every single trooper on this mission—and as he dropped blindly through the night, he imagined what the scene might look like from the outside. The small black rectangular silhouette of the troop-shuttle soaring high against the diamond-studded deep purple-black sky, spitting out its thirteen coffin-sized capsules in pairs, plus his own at the end, sending them plunging like a baker’s dozen freefalling missiles toward the planet surface so far below.

  “Thirty seconds to capsule dispersion,” the onboard computer announced. “Air pressure and temperature adjustment steady.”

  He counted off the seconds in his head. Twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one...

  “Twenty seconds to capsule dispersal. Air pressure and temperature adjustment steady.”

  “Ten seconds. Stand by to disengage cap locks,” Dylan mumbled in anticipation.

  “Ten seconds. Stand by to activate cap release.”

  Close enough. Dylan tightened his grip on the handles. He yawned, and his ears popped.

  “Five seconds. Activate cap release.”

  He twisted the handles with a sharp jerk, disengaging the cap locks, and the entire power-locking mechanism assembly tore away, taking the power source that had maintained the capsule’s structural integrity field with it. The sudden absence of that energy field allowed for the thunderous release of all remaining internal pressure, which exploded through the capsule’s abruptly destabilized walls and inner ceiling, reducing them to several million bits of harmless, scanner-blinding dust, as designed. Deaf to all but the torrent of wind that suddenly engulfed him, Dylan tumbled freely through the cold, black sky.

  The disorientation only lasted for a few seconds, but the exhilaration, he knew, would be with him all the way to the ground. He loved to jump, and he knew that had he not transferred to the Rangers he might never have gotten the opportunity to try it. Perhaps there were benefits to this assignment after all.

  He stretched his arms and legs to the four corners of the compass, flattening himself out to create drag and minimize his acceleration. Then, when he’d counted off the correct number of seconds, he pulled his arms in and placed his hands on his buttocks, going vertical to accelerate more rapidly. He could see no sign of his troops below against the fast approaching black jungle canopy, but that was to be expected.

  “Ten seconds,” his helmet’s altimeter announced through the speaker at his left ear.

  He spread his limbs to slow himself down again, to minimize the impending jolt.

  “Five seconds.”

  He waited.

  “Three, two...”

  He braced himself.

  “...one...”

  A single beep sounded briefly in his ear, signaling his parachute’s deployment, and less than two seconds later his harness jerked him up hard as the parachute snapped open.

  He looked up at the rectangular black canvas, visible in the darkness as little more than an area devoid of stars, and then captured the steering handles that swung around just above either side of his head. He peered down past his feet at the approaching treetops, which blended together to form a heavy black carpet. A veteran of more than a dozen jungle jumps, he knew all too well that once he fell below their cover he’d be plunged into utter blackness, flying blind. If he was going to crash into any branches, he wanted to hit them as softly as possible. So, just seconds before the jungle swallowed him up, he put his feet together and yanked down hard on the steering cords, slowing his decent significantly.

  He plunged through the canopy as though it were only a cloud, the whisper of leaves and slender twigs brushing and scraping against him the only sound, but the world around him grew suddenly blacker than he could possibly have imagined—blacker than any jungle he had ever jumped into before. He couldn’t even see his own hands beside his head. More abundant leaves rustled and thicker twigs snapped as he dropped through them, but at least he was managing to avoid any large branches...so far anyway.

  “Ground,” someone warned.

  Dylan yanked down on the cords as hard as he could and gently touched down onto the soft jungle floor. He ran a few steps to keep from falling until he slowed himself down, but then his chute caught on something and yanked him backwards. He turned into the breeze, slapped his harness release, and pulled it off, then pulled his chute down out of the trees. Then he knelt down and spoke quietl
y into his pin mike.

  “Any injuries?” he asked. No one responded, which of course was exactly what he’d been hoping for. “Okay, good. By the numbers.”

  Everyone counted off by their permanently assigned numbers. Then they waited for the next several minutes, silent, unmoving, listening intently to their surroundings for any indication that they had been detected.

  Once Dylan felt satisfied that all was safe, he gave the order to assemble and prepare, and in less than two minutes the squad was ready to go. He snapped his helmet’s night-vision display down into place only to find that the dense canopy was filtering out too much starlight, without which the display was useless, so he quickly retracted it again. Then he locked a magazine into his assault rifle, activated its power pack, and gave the order to move out.

  At first their trek was slow and precarious, through a forest as thick and as black as road tar. They traveled in relative silence using the faint sounds of each others’ careful footfalls to maintain their proper intervals, because bunching up could be a fatal mistake. But every once in a while someone walked into a low-flying tree branch or took a bad step and a rather solid sounding thud or the cracking and rustling of the underbrush broke that silence. Occasionally, an emotional yet carefully subdued curse followed those thuds or cracks or rustles, and with each one of those Dylan made a mental note to tack another five minutes onto the next noise and light discipline training class.

  Chapter 31

  As the hours passed and the larger of Cirra’s moons slowly rose into the heavens, its glow began to filter down through the thinning ceiling of foliage in ghostly rays. So, too, did the level of nervous anticipation among the squad members rise until it seemed to permeate the air. They all felt it, Dylan included, and they all knew it. But they knew also that they would overcome it, just as they had so many times before.

  At least now their night-vision displays would work the way they were meant to. Without bothering to give the word—he knew his troops didn’t have to be told—Dylan flipped his NVD into place over his eye. Through its dark amber-green lens, the forest took on an eerie, haunted appearance, and a feeling of foreboding suddenly filled the depths of his very soul. That feeling grew more intense as they drew steadily closer to their objective, but he kept that to himself. He wasn’t just one of the Marines. He was the squad sergeant. He was their leader. History was replete with battles that had turned tragic when those in command let their troops learn of their own misgivings and he wasn’t about to lead his squad into that kind of situation. No. It was vital that he keep any feelings of fear or doubt to himself.

  A brilliant, blinding light suddenly flooded the forest. The Marines instinctively dove and rolled for cover and froze wherever they happened to land.

  Several seconds later, when he felt sure they hadn’t come under attack, Dylan quietly asked, “Everyone’s eyes all right?” Too many times in the past, sudden flashes of bright light had literally burned unwary soldiers’ optic nerves when their NVDs’ light dampeners kicked in a split second too late and they were too slow to close their eyes. And while it was true that biotronic implants had been used to restore sight to most of them, there had been an unfortunate few who’d been permanently and irreversibly blinded.

  Fortunately, no one responded to Dylan’s question this time. He allowed himself a brief moment to quietly thank God for that, then got back to the task at hand.

  “Ortiz, scan the area.”

  “Coming right up,” she responded quietly. She pulled her virtually noiseless and lightless tactical hand-scanner from her belt pouch, activated it—only a tiny point of dim green light confirmed that it was operating—and quietly pivoted in place a full three hundred sixty degrees, searching the surrounding woods for energy emissions that might indicate the presence of any sort of motion-detection or other early warning equipment.

  “Nothing’s showing up on the scanner, Sarge,” she reported. “As far as I can tell, we didn’t trip any kind of perimeter security system or anything like that.”

  “All right. Everyone stand by.”

  The Marines remained still and silent. After what Dylan judged to be about a minute—no doubt one of the longest minutes in mankind’s history of recording time’s passage—he heard a ground vehicle approaching from the distant rear. Given the hilly terrain and the soft forest floor, a troop carrier or other armored vehicle would likely have been tracked rather than wheeled. No telltale squeals of track joints echoed through the night and he felt no teeth-rattling vibrations that such a vehicle’s incredible weight would inevitably have sent rumbling through the ground, so the vehicle approaching their rear was likely nothing more than a passenger car or light truck.

  As it grew closer, the spotlight that had nearly blinded them all tracked to the right, away from their positions, plunging them back into darkness. The vehicle passed by them not more than fifty meters to the right and continued on ahead, only to stop about a hundred meters farther up, judging from the sound.

  Marissa confirmed the distance with a quick scanner reading and at Dylan’s order they moved, ever so slowly, crawling forward through the sparse brush like a pride of lions moving in on their prey until they had drawn close enough to see their objective.

  There, situated in the center of a large clearing, was the reason for the camouflage screen the orbiting starcruiser had detected. Judging by the size of the large solid wall that appeared to completely surround it, the compound was much larger than Intelligence had reported. Perhaps that camouflage screen wasn’t so inefficient after all.

  Marissa scanned the wall, intending to report its overall size, but felt disturbed by what she found. “Wait a minute,” she quietly mumbled over the comm-link. “That can’t be right.”

  “What’s wrong?” Dylan asked.

  “It’s the wall. According to my scanner, most of it isn’t even there. Upwards of eighty-five percent of it just doesn’t show up.”

  Dylan could think of only one explanation for that, but it seemed so unlikely that he had a hard time believing he could possibly be right. “It can’t be bolamide,” he commented aloud. “Not here. Not that much.”

  “It has to be bolamide,” Marissa countered. “Doesn’t it?”

  “Are you sure your scanner is working right?”

  “It’s picking up everything else normally enough.”

  Dylan had to stop and think for a minute. Bolamide was an unusual element that, when properly processed, didn’t show up on any but the newest, most powerful and sophisticated of high-intensity shipboard scanners. Anything less, particularly anything as compact as a hand-scanner, and an object made of bolamide would appear exactly as Marissa had just described—as though it weren’t even there. But these days large veins of bolamide were only known to exist deep within the planets of the Boshtahr system—a star system nearly half a dozen light-years away that had been under Veshtonn control for more than twenty years. Few deposits of that rare ore had ever been found locally—not that finding them was all that easy—and according to the publicized reports, those that had been found were too small for anyone to bother trying to mine.

  So how in the galaxy had a group of Sulaini terrorists gotten their hands on enough of it to build that wall?

  As though she’d been reading his mind, Marissa commented, “It must have been left over from when the Veshtonn occupied this system. Where else could it have come from?”

  “Yeah. Must have been,” Dylan responded, not totally convinced that was in fact the case. After all, if true, then why would they have left such a valuable resource behind?

  After about a minute the vehicle pulled forward into the compound and the spotlight at the top of the wall went out. Darkness returned to the thick of the forest, but the moonlight left both the compound itself and the surrounding clearing dangerously illuminated. Closing in without being seen was not going to be easy.

  “Disengage night-vision if you haven’t already,” Dylan instructed as he retracted his own de
vice up into his helmet. “Let’s do this thing right and go home. Take up your positions and prepare for act one.”

  The squad dispersed. Dylan watched and waited for his vision to readjust to the natural ambient light as Marissa selected a tree and started to climb.

  She reached the top of the tree in what she figured to be record time, then took out her binocs and focused on the inside of the compound. “I can see over the wall from here,” she quietly reported. “It completely surrounds the compound. Layout is confirmed. It’s exactly as Intelligence reported, except for the spacing between the buildings. That’s about ten to fifteen percent greater. I see one guard in each of four corner towers, each with an individual weapon. Strictly small arms. Two more guards with the guy on the spotlight, manning some kind of heavy crew-served weapon I don’t recognize. There’s also one guard walking the wall, going from tower to tower. The rooftops look clear. The guard at the exterior checkpoint appears to be all alone. I’m not sure he’s even awake.”

  “No one on the outer perimeter?” Dylan asked.

  “No heat signatures on infra-red at all. Not even a little bunny rabbit.”

  Dylan considered what such a lack of perimeter security could imply. “They’re either foolishly over-confident, which is highly unlikely, or they’re expecting us,” he said. “What do you think, Corporal?”

  “I think you could’ve kept that last part to yourself, Sarge,” Ortiz commented.

  “Sorry. Can you see that vehicle?”

  “Affirm. It’s parked in front of a small building in the center. Standard Sulaini design would dictate that to be the commander’s office. There’s no one around it that I can see.”