As the last box on one truck was passed down to a woman, the man who had lowered the carton into her arms jumped down from inside the cargo box and disappeared around the side, running toward the cab. O’Keefe heard the driver’s side door slam shut. Just as the starter turned the engine, the exhausted woman lost her grip on the load she was carrying, dropping the parcel to the ground, and scattering its contents over the grass near the water. O’Keefe could not be sure what he had seen flying from the container, but he could have sworn that there were books among the contents.
As the woman dropped to her knees to retrieve the items O’Keefe saw the backup lights of the truck flash on behind her. My God! he thought, he’s put it in the wrong gear. Before he could unthinkingly shout a useless warning the truck lurched rearward, knocking the woman onto her side and then rolling over her, leaving her pinned beneath the dual wheels on the right hand side of the truck.
The woman’s screams brought a sudden halt to all activity on the shore. Her comrades rushed to her, seeking to help, but were unable to extricate her; one of her arms and a shoulder appeared to still be caught directly beneath the oversized tires. Finally one of them, apparently a corpsman of some type, knelt next to her and administered morphine or some other medication, and the woman’s pain laden shrieks quickly subsided and then ceased entirely. From what little O’Keefe could see between the bodies that surrounded her, she appeared to have been rendered unconscious.
Once calm had been restored to the spillway, O’Keefe at once felt empty and sick over the scene he had just witnessed. He fought back the urge to retch. One of the strangers had less control than he did, and did just that; running off to vomit into the edge of the lake.
The others stood by in a tight circle next to the back of the truck, alternately squatting to study the woman’s plight and then standing and appearing to argue excitedly about what to do next. After several long moments had passed, they came to a decision. It was their only choice, O’Keefe thought. They started the truck and backed it further down toward the water, freeing the woman without rolling the tires over the whole of her torso for a second time. Once she could be lifted, several of her friends gathered her gently into their arms and carefully handed her up to others who were waiting to bear her into the saucer.
But solving one problem had given rise to another. In backing the truck closer to the saucer, the undercarriage had pushed a short way up the craft’s sloping entry ramp. Now some of the weight of the truck rested there rather than on its wheels. When the intruders attempted to move the truck forward, the tires merely spun into the wet earth adjacent to the water while the vehicle itself went nowhere. It wasn’t long before the driver, seeing that his effort was futile, exited the cab and rejoined the others who were still standing about in a ragged circle on the spillway.
Again, there was a knotted conclave and an argumentative discussion, only this time the voices were louder and more animated. At last one man took charge and started to shout clearly audible, but nevertheless utterly alien sentences. His pointing gestures and forceful body language made it clear the words were commands. He was obviously the officer in charge. Immediately the driver departed the group and went again to seat himself behind the wheel of the truck while his fellows, and several more people called down from the interior of the saucer, applied brute strength to the rear of the truck in an attempt to free it. But the wheels still simply spun in place, throwing gobs of mud on to the clothing of those pushing from behind.
They seemed incognizant of the filth. Their efforts were frantic, almost panic stricken. O’Keefe could clearly see that all of them consistently took short, furtive gazes over their shoulders and toward the heavens, as if afraid that unseen dangers lurked high overhead. Their unease was contagious, and O’Keefe found that he too was unable to resist taking a few quick glances around the sky, but he saw nothing. Other than the stars and the crescent moon, there were only the flashes of a faraway thunderstorm that had coalesced in the humid summer troposphere and now rumbled ominously in the distance.
But unseen fears aside, O’Keefe had a more immediate and tangible reason for anxiety. The current pulling his boat was caused by water pouring into the top of a drain pipe, a pipe used to keep the water level of the lake more or less constant. The pipe stood vertically beneath the surface of the lake, plunging to a depth of nearly forty feet before elbowing ninety degrees and piercing the dam near its base. At the far end the pipe dumped water at a rate that varied from a trickle to a raging torrent, depending on the amount of recent rainfall, into a rocky streambed on the other side of the dam. At present it was disgorging the lake’s rain swollen contents at a rate rapid enough to make the water writhe in foamy chop as it fell among the rocks—a rate that provided more than sufficient suction to quickly pull toward it any floating object unfortunate enough to be caught near the pipe’s inlet. That inlet was surrounded by a sturdy, galvanized, rectangular sieve of steel designed to filter out any large debris, while the sieve itself was topped by a concrete slab. The whole assemblage protruded several feet above the water and O’Keefe’s boat was now ever more rapidly drifting toward an imminent collision with the structure at a speed which, when combined with the substantial mass of the boat, could quite possibly cause significant damage. That was not to mention the noise it would make. O’Keefe silently debated his options for only a moment before he reluctantly flipped up the toggle that released the anchor. He winced as it splashed into the water and its connecting chain rattled loudly through the hawse hole.
But the people on the shore labored on obliviously, the noise of the truck engine roaring fruitlessly and the extremity of their own situation deafening them to any distractions out on the water. O’Keefe heaved a sigh of relief as the anchor caught and the boat swung nearly one hundred and eighty degrees, coming to a halt with its propellers only a few feet from the concrete-capped drain. However, he had drifted close enough to the structure that it obscured his view of the mired panel truck.
With difficulty, he turned to his right and pulled his legs over the center console of the boat, placing his unfeeling feet on the passenger seat cushion. Then he grasped the gunwale at his back with both hands, and tried to hoist himself atop it. But the stock of his .45, sticking out under the back of his armpit, caught the interior edge of the gunwale and held him inside the boat. He tried to jerk the holster forward a bit, to move it closer to his chest than his armpit, but the life preserver he wore prevented it.
Swearing silently, he released the clasps that held the flotation device to his chest and lifted it over his head, refastening it over his right shoulder rather than his neck. At last he was able to pull the gun forward an inch or two and then lift his body up onto the gunwale. From there he could see over the drainpipe assembly and across to the spillway. Gripping the chrome edge of the boat’s windscreen tightly between the fingers of his left hand, he was able to balance securely and still manipulate the night scope with his right.
The scene before him was unchanged. The rental truck still roared and the group of men and women still pushed at it from behind. After only a few more seconds of unproductive expenditure of effort, they gave up their attempt, shut down the truck, and met again near the base of the ramp. Suddenly one started to chatter excitedly while the others seemed to gain strength from his exhortations. The idea man ran up into the saucer, emerging back from within almost immediately carrying something that could have been a cell phone. He proceeded to lead the others off at a trot across the spillway and toward the nearest stand of trees.
O’Keefe lost sight of the group as the stranded truck blocked his view, but seconds later there was a small crackling, explosive sound followed immediately by the crash of a falling tree. There were several more sounds akin to the first, and then silence. Moments later the group returned to the saucer’s ramp carrying part of a tree trunk under their arms as if it were a battering ram. The column of wood, about twenty feet long, was utterly denuded of limbs and bark, the
wood appearing shiny and smooth in the dim light of O’Keefe’s scope. While one man cranked up the truck, others positioned the tree trunk lengthwise beneath it, placing the base of the bole almost directly below the rear axle, and began to use it as a lever, laying their shoulders to the wood and pushing upward on it with all their strength, attempting to raise the truck’s undercarriage clear of the ramp. Still others of the intruders again pushed manually against the back of the vehicle.
O’Keefe sat on the gunwale, astonished; faced with yet another question for which he had no answer. What kind of tool could knock down, strip, and cleanly smooth a tree in only seconds? It seemed impossible, yet it had obviously happened, even if it had been done where he could not see.
Part of him wanted to fire up his engines and flee across the lake, away from the strange and unaccountably inept intruders and back to the familiar security of his home and his dogs. But curiosity prevailed over his better judgment and kept him frozen to his perch. And besides, despite their obvious technological adroitness, even his paranoid instincts no longer perceived the trespassers to be a potential threat or a likely source of violence. The events of the last few minutes had made them seem more bumbling and frightened than menacing.
Back on the ramp the group continued their exertions, and as they did so the truck finally began to inch slowly forward. At last the tires found the traction they sought, and the big vehicle lurched ahead and out onto the spillway. The driver guided it over to where the remainder of the vehicles were parked. He exited the cab, and started to jog toward the next partially laden truck, only to be stopped by a shout from the saucer hatch.
It came from the same man who had taken charge before. He stood agitated in the hatchway, urgently gesturing at the driver to return. The driver, for his part, seemed eager to comply, as he turned and immediately sprinted athletically back toward the craft. The ramp began to retract even as his footfalls pounded up to the entry. The saucer began to rise before the hatch slid shut behind him. It sped silently upward, O’Keefe quickly losing sight of it in the blackness between the stars.
Then just as he lowered the night scope a small, seemingly solid globe of brilliant white light shot across the sky, illuminating the lake like a thousand lightning bolts. It disappeared into a yellow and orange coruscation that marked the genesis of an explosion. In a split second the blast grew astronomically until it nearly blotted out the sky.
O’Keefe, blinded by the expanding fireball, knew instinctively that he was far too close to a blast of such magnitude too simply remain where he was and hope to emerge unscathed. But there was no time to run, and only one place to hide. He released his grip on the windscreen of the boat and pushed himself away from it. His upper body fell back toward the water, dragging his legs over the side of the boat as he went. But he had not been quick enough. Before the cold water could close over him the concussion and heat arrived, turning the serene mountain tarn into a steaming, seething cauldron of fire and shrapnel from above. Fortunately for O’Keefe, the pressure wave from the explosion also knocked him unconscious before the shrieking messages of pain that raced across his undamaged ganglia arrived at his brain.
CHAPTER EIGHT:
Mercy from Above
Alone on the flight deck of the cutter, Willet Lindy was bored to tears. What a milk run, he thought. He reclined the pilot’s seat back a few degrees and stretched, suppressing a yawn. He was flying second this time out, so there wasn’t much to do. He had taken Talon from Vigilant, dropped a small communications relay so they could stay in contact with the ship even from the far side of the planet, then put the cutter in orbit around the aberrant world before going atmospheric and bringing her to a lazy hover high above the extraction point. As usual the spot was deserted. The med tech’s scan had revealed only one humanoid within miles, and that single life sign was on the other side of a mountain. Once the scan was complete and the report called in there was nothing left on Talon’s agenda. The cutter’s only duty now was to stay out of sight and maintain surveillance over the area, watching for aberrant aircraft, until the acquisition team was retrieved and the barge lifted from the surface. So Lindy had hidden Talon in the midst of a thunderstorm a few dozen kilometers away and now waited for Albatross to drop down for the rendezvous. Once the team was aboard and the barge was away it would be a short hop back to the ship as an escort and another routine flight would be in the books.
Lindy removed the com set from his ears and with the pressure of a single fingertip on the controls cleared the black from the cockpit glass that surrounded him, opening his senses to the storm that raged around Talon. He watched in wonder as the preternaturally bright flashes of lightning sizzled through the air and flinched at each crashing detonation that accompanied the bolts. The antigravs dampened the turbulence to something of a rocking motion while the shields deflected a great deal of the noise, but still the flight deck had become a front row seat to one of nature’s most breathtaking and menacing spectacles.
It was a new experience for Lindy. He was from Namoneta, one of the older and more populous worlds of the Union, where weather control had been in use for centuries before he had been born. He had rarely been an eyewitness to the power of unbridled nature, and certainly never near enough to have seen it on a scale such as this. It was horrifyingly entrancing. He spun his chair this way and that beneath the invisible canopy that protected him, not wanting to miss any of the violence that danced around the ship. It was as if he was seated out in the midst of the storm, and he was enjoying the sensation immensely.
He could have easily parked elsewhere, away from the storm, as Talon was more than adequately protected against any detection devices the aberrants were capable of fielding, but it was always possible that one of the flying machines that Talon was on the lookout for might approach on a course that would eventually bring them close enough to spot the cutter visually. Then he would have to evade them and find a place to hide anyway. Besides, he was a perfectionist, particularly in regard to his flying skills, so taking every possible precaution was as innately natural to him as a heartbeat.
There was also the fact that he loved the little cutters. He did not want to take the chance, however remote, that some damage might be inflicted to one of them. The aberrants were notoriously touchy about intrusions and had been known to send armed craft in pursuit of completely innocuous drones any time they were lucky enough to stumble across one. At least that was what Lindy had heard. He had no firsthand knowledge as this was the only time he had been anywhere near Sol Three. But whatever the truth was, the lunatics that lived here were not going to as much as put a scratch on his ship.
Normally, he would have been upset to be lazing around doing nothing, angry that he had not been chosen to fly first on a sortie of such importance. But this time he was relieved to be sitting in this chair rather than Deckar’s. This time, had he been assigned to Deckar’s seat, he would have been looking at a long quarantine when he got back to Vigilant, just for having been in close contact with the members of the acquisition team. The barge had been specially outfitted to serve as living quarters for the team during the return home, and even back in the Union Deckar would still be secluded with them at an unnamed medical facility. That would have meant months away from Cyanne had Lindy been in his place. Plus Deckar was a friend, a damn good pilot, and had been next on the duty roster. That was not to mention that flying first would have put Lindy at the controls of the Albatross. The barge was a nice enough ship, with its big antigravs and powerful engines; but it was still just a fat, round barge. The cutters, on the other hand, were winged and stiletto shaped; much like smaller, thinner versions of Vigilant. They were quick and extremely maneuverable, a pilot’s dream. Even on as boring a hop as this one, flying a cutter was infinitely preferable to piloting the barge. Lindy was as happy on a cutter flight deck as he was anywhere. Well, maybe not. There were the times when he was alone with Cyanne.
His mind started down the path of an erotic day
dream before he chastised himself and pushed the pleasant visions away, forcing himself instead to scan his instruments. His gaze flowed over them as a vain fop might inspect his visage in the mirror. Lindy was always acutely aware of even the subtlest imperfections or insignificant deficiencies in the automated controls of the various ships he was rated for, deficiencies that few other pilots would have even noticed, much less had the temerity to attempt to correct. And now, despite the computer control that kept Talon relatively stable inside the storm, several minute inadequacies in the craft’s performance, made evident by the duress placed upon it by the maelstrom outside its skin, glared at Lindy from the panel like insults. Quickly he made slight adjustments manually, scowling as he did so and updating the programming as he went. He made a mental note to download the changes to Talon’s sister cutter, the Raptor, as soon as he was back shipboard. Satisfied, for the moment at least, at the performance of his ship, he leaned back in his chair once more to enjoy the impressive light show that still rumbled about the cutter on every side.
There was a reason he was alone on the flight deck, and that reason was there was only a skeleton crew aboard. That was normal on a ship flying second, for if some unlikely accident or equipment failure grounded the Albatross on the surface, Talon would need the space to pack in those who would otherwise be stranded. If the occasion arose, every square meter of deck space would be precious. Besides himself, there were only two others aboard: a med tech and a payload specialist, or p-spec as they were often called, neither of whom Lindy was acquainted with closely. He had passed them in the corridors of Vigilant from time to time, but that was the extent of his knowledge of either crew member. Both of them were stationed below. He had not bothered to leave the cockpit to speak with them, and they would never dare to show their faces on the flight deck. Lindy considered himself to be an outgoing, hospitable man, and he very much enjoyed parties and other social gatherings, but as a pilot he had a reputation for professional detachment, a detachment which bordered on aloofness. If you had no job to do in the cockpit, everyone knew their presence there would not be welcome. Lindy’s viewpoint was that the cockpit was the pilots’ personal domain.
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