Murphy rubbed his eyes and wished the day was over, but he still had to go through Makarov’s comparatively dowdy, carefully parsed and tediously detailed Spin-focused intelligence summaries. They were the very model of proper military report writing. They also made Murphy want to gouge his eyes out with one of the ubiquitous SpinDog sporks. But he’d tasked “Pistol Pete” to gather useful insights from his increasing exposure to, and interest in, the culture of the Spins.
In the wake of the snuffed out Hardliner junta and increasing Expansionist suspicions (bordering on certainty) that Mara Lee’s pregnancy was the result of a union with a SpinDog, more info had started to flow. Not a lot, and every move toward more casual, routine relations carried the risk of committing some offense against customs, manners, or decorum that necessitated the soothing of local feathers.
Still, every once in a while, Makarov scored some important insights. One emerged from his linguistic background and led to easier instruction of both new SpinDog helo jocks and the pilots Bowden was preparing for the attack on the transmitter. Specifically, while the Dornaani translator had done a damned impressive job of preparing the Lost Soldiers to communicate with the locals, it had left a couple of absolute blind spots, one of which was aeronautical terminology for describing movement, direction, and relative position. This despite the fact that the aviators of both cultures had near-identical concepts of the particulars of flight.
Enter linguist Pyotr Makarov who made no headway until he noticed the nearly universal etymological origins of such terms among the many languages of Terrans: they were adapted from the language of mariners. In English, it was particularly pronounced: roll, pitch, and yaw had their origins in the motion of ships at sea. So too did terms like “sheer off” and “headwind” and many, many others. So, didn’t such terms exist in Ktoran?
Well, in fact they did—but they had fallen out of use among the SpinDogs once they left R’Bak and its oceans and rivers. Over time, they had evolved a far more precise, vector-oriented lexicon derived from the different conditions and circumstances encountered in zero gee and vacuum. Thanks to Makarov’s work, the translation of the terms became a genuine equivalence among meanings rather than a baffled acceptance that two sets of entirely different phonemes had the same meaning without having any appreciable analog in their roots.
Improvement of flight training was the immediate practical benefit of Makarov’s linguistic detective work, but it also engraved a small footnote into the back of Murphy’s mind: that in order to truly understand the SpinDogs, one had to remember that they were almost purely creatures of space—and the ramifications of that difference were as deep as they were broad.
That difference played a role in yet another of Pistol’s useful observations. It was presumed that one of the reasons the SpinDogs were so focused upon R’Bak was because they knew that one day they could live there and so, leave behind the almost innumerable impediments and dangers of space all around them.
In fact, almost none felt the pull toward a green world as a longing or a need, though, and perhaps only a third of them felt that they would like to try living on one. In fact, the great majority of SpinDogs were of the considered opinion that planets were dirty, crawling with bugs and disease, and impossibly primitive…so much so, that many believed that merely living on a biogenic planet would somehow induce evolutionary regression.
That revelation also led to the discovery of its profound opposite in a small section of the SpinDog population: those who had aspirations to become liaisons. For those who were already curious about the world, the possibility of increased access was an exciting opportunity. The only problem was that it was too soon to expand routine contact with the R’Baku, even those in the comparatively isolated polar regions that neither the Kulsians nor the satraps’ traders visited.
But for all of those who were fated to be disappointed in their ambition to become a liaison, a whole new avenue of dirtside access opened up: pilots and crew for both interface craft and the growing inventory of Hueys. Now, anyone who had started investing time and effort in an accelerated full-gee or partial-gee exercise and preparation regimen was eagerly sought after. Even those who could not master the academics could hope to find roles as crew.
News of this increased need for personnel who could work and live in a planetary environment spread like wildfire: a term that, ironically, had to be explained to the SpinDogs. At Makarov’s last count, the number of candidates was about five to one for every slot, but the opportunities kept expanding, so those who came too late or needed more gee-acclimatization were not rejected, but put on a re-testing list. It seemed that crewing air- and spacecraft on and to R’Bak was not going to present the staffing problem that many had feared it would…
Visions of satrap troops fleeing before waves of approaching Hueys popped like soap bubbles as Makarov came rushing through the hatchway into the CP.
“Major, this just came, in right after Vat’s final report.”
“Can it wait?”
“I think not, sir.”
Murphy heard the tone, glanced up. Makarov looked even more dour than usual. Murphy stuck out his hand for the folder clenched in his staff officer’s white-knuckled grip.
Murphy set it down on the center of his desk, flipped it open. Satellite images from the Dornaani birds. Murphy leaned over to look more closely. “Shit!”
“Very much so, sir. Shall I schedule a meeting with—?”
“Can’t wait,” snapped Murphy, jumping up from his chair unsteadily. He told himself that was the Coriolis Effect, but knew that was a lie; he’d adapted to that long ago. Christ, how long can I keep the MS under wraps if it’s starting to affect my balance?
Suppressing the cold stab of fear behind his sternum, he grabbed the most damning photos and strode past Makarov.
* * * * *
Part Seven: Bowden
Chapter Seventy-Two
Spin One
Bowden sighed as he sat down to a well-earned dinner that he had silently tagged as, “hydroponically grown pseudo-food menu number four.” It was okay, but the lack of variety in the rohabs was only one of the reasons why Lost Soldiers were eager to get planetside. It helped that he was hungry; a long day in the SpinDog flight simulators were pretty tiring. Not because it was exhausting, but professionally terrifying: the interface craft were really designed for ascent and descent. Level flight was far less stable than what he was used to; cruise really didn’t have a sweet spot. And anything vaguely like a combat maneuver quickly brought the aircraft—if you could call it that—to the edge of aerodynamic stability. Sighing, happy the day was over at last, he lifted the first spork of bland mystery food to his mouth…
“What do you make of this?” Murphy’s voice asked from over his shoulder.
“I’m sorry?” Bowden managed not to start, looked up from his abortive first bite, spork frozen halfway to his mouth. “What do I make of what?”
“This.” Murphy slid some imagery onto the table. “This is the latest imagery of your target.”
Bowden pursed his lips as he inspected the pictures and pushed his plate to the side. “This is bad. They’re almost ready to use it.”
Murphy nodded. “Almost all the tiles are in place in the dish.”
Bowden shook his head. “I’m not talking about that.” He pointed to a pad off to the side of the suspected control station where at least 20 vehicles sat. “You know what this is?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
Bowden frowned and looked at the arrangement of the vehicles. He’d seen a lot of vehicle pools and armor depots—right before blowing them off the map. These didn’t look like his former targets. The way the vehicles were parked was not only too tidy, but too tight, as though no one had any intent of having them deploy with any appreciable speed. Not a one of them. Bowden tapped the antenna. “How are they going to supply power to the transmitter? Do they have some sort of generator nearby?”
Murphy shook h
is head tightly. “Not that I’m aware. They’re pretty low tech. Like I told you before, I’m surprised they were able to make the antenna.”
Bowden shrugged. “We built Arecibo in the early 1960s. It’s hard, but not really that hard if you have some idea what you’re doing. They’ve been visited by space-faring societies, after all. They have to have some concept of the principles involved.”
He tapped the image with the vehicles. “That’s what they’re going to use to power it—those vehicles. They are probably charging some sort of battery or maybe a capacitor they’re going to use to power the transmitter. Or, if they’re some sort of fuel-cell variants, they could be plugged into it directly. And these shiny panels on the back of all these APCs they’ve got parked here? It doesn’t look like our models, but I’m betting that’s some kind of solar panel.” He leaned away from the images. “That’s why they’re at the site, now: they’re the transmitter’s power plant. Instead of running around doing whatever it is they would normally do. This means the system is very close to being operational.” Murphy did not look happy, but neither did he look surprised. “You knew?”
He shook his head. “I wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but you just convinced me.” Murphy frowned, kept examining the map.
“And?” Bowden prompted.
“And it means the enemy just leap-frogged us and grabbed the initiative. We’d been planning to bring all the vehicles and trained indigs we could to this site. Slowly, in the hope that we wouldn’t give ourselves away until we were within a hundred klicks or so.” He waved at the pictures. “But this changes everything. We still might be able to get two light mechanized columns there to attack, but not to achieve what we’d hoped.”
“Which was what, again?” Bowden had given up keeping tabs on the ground campaign since, with every passing week, it had looked more and more like that option was starting to circle the bowl.
Murphy shrugged. “Screen off the entire site with aggressive patrols, mount a feint to pull the enemy into the field, and get them to reveal any heavy weapons or positions. They’d probably have shifted their triple-A into an anti-armor role—and that would have given us the ability to clear your path. Also, we would have been able to suppress or interdict any air defense launches, whether SAMs or MANPADs.” He shook his head. “But now, we’d be lucky to gather sufficient numbers to get there when you do. If we were to send everyone in dribs and drabs, the local defenses would probably tear them to pieces. But waiting for a reasonable mass of force means we could be slipping behind the enemy’s mission clock. We’ve got to get the strike package down to the planet and hit this thing ASAP, because the stakes are even higher now.”
“Higher than knocking out the transmitter?”
Murphy shook his head. “No. That supersedes all other considerations. But look at all these vehicles: all electrics. Solar panels, hydrogen powered fuel cells. We really didn’t know they had these, and certainly not so many that they could gather them together like a mobile powerplant. But it also means that the satraps are gambling big. They’ve not only put all their best vehicles on the line and all in one place; they’re hooked up as batteries or, like you say, pumping a capacitor. So when we hit, they can’t pull these back into combat; they’re wired up and committed. And if we actually capture all or most of them, the satraps of Hamain Ashband will go from being the masters of the wide open spaces to a scattering of isolated princelings bunkered into their cities and huddling behind their walls. So, like I say, we need to get this show on the road. Yesterday.”
Bowden folded his arms. “I agree. The sooner, the better. But we’re not ready yet. We haven’t done any of the live weapons testing, and we don’t have our people in place to designate the targets.”
“We’ll try to get you time to test once you’re down there, but if this thing is ready to go, you may not be able to get the ground force in place. You may just have to go and throw bombs at it, and at least delay it becoming operational.”
“You mean we’d just be pitching bombs into the reflector panels?”
“If that’s what it takes, yes. Then we follow up with the ground forces—if they can get through the defenses…on which we have next to no intel.” He sighed. “But the bottom line is that we can’t let the satrap get a message off to Kulsis.”
“If we hit it early, though, it’s going to be a bitch going back. Once we’ve tipped our hand and shown them our capabilities, they’re going to ring the antenna with every gun and missile they have.”
“Yes, they are. But we’ll have to do it anyway, if it comes to that.”
“Well, fuck.”
“Exactly.”
Bowden sighed. “Okay, so what’s your plan? You said we’re going to go down to the planet for the attack?”
“Yes. We’ll get you planetside via a high-angle polar insertion, then equip the craft and get them ready for the mission.”
Bowden nodded. “Makes sense. Trying to develop some sort of heat shield for the weapons systems would have been a bitch, and no one likes having ordnance go off alongside you.” He smiled. “Back when I did—” he stopped with a wince. “When I flew—before that day—I never thought it sounded like fun, anyway.”
“No, I’ll bet not. Bottom line is we’re going to get you down to the planet ASAP, along with the personnel and equipment you need for the mission. Once you get set up there, you can do whatever testing you need, assuming there’s time.”
“So,” Bowden asked with a wry smile, “when do we leave?”
Murphy’s grim expression remained unchanged. “Funny you should ask…”
* * * * *
Chapter Seventy-Three
R’Bak
Bowden walked off the interface craft and got his first look at R’Bak. It reminded him of his weapons detachments at Naval Air Station Fallon, Nevada. Hot and dry, with an emphasis on hot and dry. And, if he understood correctly, it was going to get a lot hotter and drier as the Searing approached. A number of people were working to unload the supplies the interface craft carried, and he pulled one aside.
“First time here,” he said. “Where do I go?”
The man—his rank was unknown since he was working in a sweat-stained T-shirt—pointed toward a point of land to the west. “It’s just around there…uh, sir,” he added.
“Is there any sort of transportation?”
“Sorry, sir. The trucks are for carrying the bombs and stuff you guys brought down.” He nodded to Bowden’s legs. “Your only transport is what God gave you, unless you can ride a whinnie.”
“A whinnie?”
“Big-ass lizards. That are really mammals. I think.”
“No thanks.”
“Then I’m afraid you’ll have to walk. It’s how we get back and forth, too. You’ll also want a hat, and soon.”
“Thanks,” Bowden said with a resigned sigh and a glance up at the dual suns. He started walking. The air wing had to do a lot of walking around Fallon, too, during their periodic trips there. You got used to it. As long as you didn’t work hard, you didn’t even sweat much, since the ultra-arid air wicked it off as soon as it appeared on your skin.
As he approached the point of land, he saw a large figure who had stopped and was looking around.
“Hi, Dork,” he said when he recognized the soldier.
“Hi, suh,” the trooper said, saluting.
“What are you doing?”
“Well, I was told the camp was this way, but I don’t see it, and I wasn’t sure if it was this way or around that point of land over there.” He sighed. “I’m lost, suh.”
Bowden smiled. His sense of direction is really bad if he can’t go from one point to another. “You’re on the right path. It should just be around this point of land.”
They started walking again, and the tent city began to materialize from behind the rocky outcropping a minute later. “See?” Bowden asked. “You were almost to it.”
The big soldier smiled. “Thanks, suh. Directions
are hard.”
Bowden smiled but privately worried. Hopefully, the soldier could remember the directions he’d been given on operating the mule.
Camp Stark was nestled back in a small, sheltered area between two slopes a short way from the edge of the tableland that overlooked a long valley. In addition to the tents that marked the Terran presence on the planet, Bowden could see a corral as they approached, and he got his first look at the whinnies.
The massive creatures resembled a cross between an iguana and a Komodo dragon, if they’d been fed steroids from birth. From head to tail, they were over three meters long, and stood well over a meter high at the shoulder. They had wide, clawed feet, which were obviously made for digging, and would probably help with climbing some of the arid landscape nearby.
A pretty, olive-skinned woman was teaching a corporal how to ride as they walked by. Although her instruction seemed patient and well thought out, the corporal was having difficulties, and the more the corporal fought, the more the whinnie stamped and snorted.
Bowden stepped up to the railing and chuckled. He’d happily take an F/A-18 over one of the bucking lizards any day of the week. If we weren’t a gazillion miles and a couple of centuries from the closest Hornet, that is.
The woman turned. “Want to give it a try since you think it’s so funny?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t,” Bowden said. “I was just wondering, though, how hard it was to teach people to ride those things. We have a mission where people will need to go a long way, fast, and those things—whinnies, right?—are probably the best way to get them there.”
“They’re not hard to ride,” she said with a smile, “even if the corporal is having difficulties. As soon as he stops fighting the whinnie, he’ll be fine.”
Bowden nodded to Dork. “Even someone as big as him?”
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