VOR 06 Operation Sierra-75

by Gressman, Thomas S

  9

  “What do you think, Gunny?” Captain Taggart asked Onawa Frost.

  “Well, sir,” the Mohawk gunnery sergeant replied, with a shrug. “I don’t know. All the preliminary reports we got about this planet said it was uninhabited. Our intelligence boys say that the Neo-Sovs have kinda pulled back on their space-exploration efforts. And it looks like both reports are wrong.”

  “Go on,” Taggart prompted.

  The Marine officer and his senior noncom stopped their upward climb, motioning the troops behind them to continue along the trail. Gunny Frost rested her left foot on a low parapet overlooking a narrow gorge, her Jackal combat shotgun braced across her knee, her arms folded atop the weapon’s receiver. Taggart slung his rifle, shoving it behind him, and mimicked her pose. Leaning forward, he picked up a handful of small white pebbles. To his eye, the stones seemed to be made of the same material as the flagstones of the road.

  Gunny Frost’s thoughtful expression was barely visible behind the environment suit’s masking faceplate. Characteristically, she took a long moment to digest the available information before rendering an opinion. Taggart tossed a few pebbles into the gorge while he waited for Frost to speak.

  “If I remember right, we got a report about six months back that said the Neo-Sovs were working on some kind of surface-to-space antiship missile, didn’t we?”

  “That’s right,” Taggart said. “Designated SS-N-25 ‘Grappler.’ ”

  “That’s the one. Now, what if the Intel boys were wrong about the Neo-Sovs and exploration?” Frost suggested. “What if Cabot was brought down by a Grappler? And those tracks that Dade and Black found. Those could easily have been made by a Cyclops or some other kind of Neo-Sov mutant.”

  “I was thinking the same thing, Gunny.” Taggart nodded. “That would mean that the Neo-Sovs are up to something pretty important on this rock. Grapplers are big, expensive pieces of equipment. They wouldn’t move a launcher all the way out here unless they had a powerful reason for doing so.”

  “Uh-huh. That means we’ve got . . .” Frost broke off in mid-sentence. “Now that’s odd, sir.” She put her hand up to shade her eyes. “We’ve got fog rising in the heat of the day.”

  Taggart straightened from his resting slouch. His eyes followed Gunny Frost’s line of sight. About thirty meters uphill of their position a thin gray mist began blowing across the trail. The lead elements of their platoon had almost reached the wispy gray wall.

  “It is kinda unusual, Gunny,” Taggart agreed. “But then, what isn’t unusual about this planet? Right now, though, we’ve got more important things to think about than fog.”

  “Captain Taggart,” Dr. Cortez called, making her way to where the Marines stood. “I want to show you something. One of my medics found this in the drainage ditch.”

  Cortez held out her hand, displaying a metal circlet nearly twice the size of the palm of her hand. The hoop appeared to be made of gold, but when she passed it to Taggart, he discovered that the object had nearly no weight. He examined the object closely, and was able to pick out strange, scrawling markings on both its inner and outer surfaces.

  “Gunny? Any ideas?” he asked, holding out the ring to Onawa Frost.

  Frost didn’t reply, and made no move to take the object. Instead, she remained stiffly in place, staring at the mist on the trail in front of them.

  No, it isn’t simply gathering, Taggart realized. It’s rolling downhill toward us.

  “Gunny.” Taggart laid a hand on Frost’s shoulder. Even through the environment suit, he could feel the rigidity in her muscles. He gently shook her, as though trying to rouse her from sleep. “Gunny Frost.”

  Then Taggart felt the first touch of the gathering mist. Unlike normal Terran fog, the gray floating vapor was warm. A faint, bitter scent of dry dust, like ancient paper, filtered through the suit’s mask. Taggart felt an odd itching sensation run from the base of his spine to the top of his skull. Beneath his thick kevlon helmet, he felt his scalp tighten.

  As the mist reached out to envelop the three of them, Taggart heard Gunny Frost gasp. The doctor’s words suddenly slurred and sped up as though on a tape being played back at high speed.

  Then sudden pain spiked into his hands like a red-hot needle, and the mist enveloped them all. The pain writhed up Taggart’s arms to the elbows, sending thin tendrils of liquid fire along his upper arms and across his shoulders. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the burning pain was gone, leaving only a dull ache. Taggart looked around for Lieutenant Cortez, but he couldn’t see either her or Gunnery Sergeant Frost. Nor was there any trace of his platoon or Cortez’s rescue medics. All Taggart could see was the thin gray mist and the small portion of the road upon which he stood.

  “Lion Three, this is Lion Six, come in,” Taggart called, trying to reach Gunny Frost via radio communicator. A high-pitched keening, like a high wind in the rocks, blanketed every frequency, though Taggart was certain he could hear words in the odd, electronic screeching.

  They can’t have left me here, Taggart told himself.

  Oh no, smart guy? Then where are they? An inner voice seemed to mock him.

  “Only one way to go,” he said aloud. His voice sounded flat, distorted in the swirling gray mist.

  He moved the Pitbull assault rifle in front of his body, one aching hand wrapped around the weapon’s firing grip. The other hand grasped its forestock. Captain Taggart turned away from the low stone parapet and began moving uphill. A faint stirring of fear roiled through his guts. He was alone in a blind fog, on a mostly unmapped and demonstrably hostile planet. He prayed that he would not meet the Neo-Soviet troops who he was convinced were on Sierra Seven-Five. He resolved that, should he run into the enemy, he would not be taken alive, though with only two hundred seventy rounds for his Pitbull and forty-five for his Pug, he wouldn’t be fighting much of a pitched battle. The best he could hope for was to take a few of them with him.

  Unable to see more than a few feet in front of him, Taggart moved in a cautious foot-shuffling walk. He probed the ground ahead of him with his toes, only moving forward when he was convinced that there was no hazard to trip over. The slow pace was grueling. After the first twenty minutes or so, Taggart’s leg muscles began to ache from the odd gait. After two hours, he was in agony from cramps brought on by the bent-kneed posture. Still the fog refused to lift or thin out. Every hour or so, he would stop, sitting on the edge of the drainage channel for a few minutes to ease his knotted muscles. During those stops, he would try to contact either the rescue team, the assault boats, or the Gallatin, but every call went unanswered, save for the high-pitched warbling shriek blanketing the communication channels.

  How long he went on like that Taggart could not say. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the mist vanished.

  Glancing wildly about in the strangely clear air, Taggart saw that he had caught up with his platoon without knowing it.

  No, something was distinctly wrong. He knew he had been climbing the steep grade for hours—the aches in his muscles confirmed that—but the dim shadows cast by the odd light of the Maw were in exactly the same place as they had been when the mist set in. Gunny Frost was still leaning on the leg she had propped up on the parapet, an odd mixture of bafflement and fear plain in her stance and visor-shielded eyes. Dr. Cortez was prattling on about the odd metal ring her medic had found. The rest of the platoon had come to a halt, almost every man appearing confused. Only a few looked as though nothing had happened.

  “All right, what the hell was that?” Frost growled, recovering her voice.

  “What was what, Sergeant?” Cortez asked in confusion.

  “We’ve been on the trail for hours,” Frost snapped. “And now, we’re right back in the same damn place we were eight hours ago.”

  “No, Gunny,” Taggart said, stepping up to Frost and Cortez. “It’s only been three hours or so, four at the most. And where the hell were all of you? What did you do, switch all the communicators in the platoo
n off? Why didn’t you answer my calls? Hell, why did you leave me behind in the first place?”

  “Leave you behind?” Frost stared at him. “Boss, we didn’t leave anybody behind. You were right beside me the whole time.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Cortez yelled. “Nothing happened. Nothing but a little bit of fog rolling across the trail. You both stopped talking for a second or so, and now you’re acting like half a day’s gone by.”

  “It has, Lieutenant,” Frost snapped, holding up her left wrist. “Look at my chrono. We’ve been marching in circles for eight hours.”

  “Let me see that, Gunny,” Taggart said, taking her arm. He held Frost’s left wrist close to his own. The digital chronograph, part of the small electronics package built into the back of her environment suit’s left gauntlet plainly showed that eight hours had elapsed since they had stopped to talk about the possible presence of Neo-Sov troops on Sierra Seven-Five. But Taggart’s chrono showed four hours had gone by. Cortez held her timepiece out for comparison. According to her chrono, no significant time had elapsed.

  “Dammit,” Taggart swore under his breath. Then, keying in the platoon’s tactical channel, he called out, “Platoon halt. Form up on me.”

  “What about us, boss?” Dade’s voice broke from the headset. “You want us to come in?”

  “Negative, Falcon,” the captain replied. “Question: Have you or Black noticed anything odd in the last few minutes?”

  “No sir. Well, not other than a little bit of mist that passed between your position and ours. Did you see it, sir?”

  “Affirmative,” Taggart said. “Falcon, what time does your chrono show?”

  “Sir?”

  “What time is it, Lance Corporal?”

  “Sir, my chrono shows one-three-hundred, Zulu.” Dade answered. His tone suggested that he was wondering if his captain had suddenly gone mad.

  “Falcon, confirm your last, current time is one-three-hundred, Zulu time?” Taggart said, looking at Cortez’s chrono. Dade’s report matched her digital display perfectly. Both devices proclaimed the time to be one o’clock in the afternoon Greenwich Mean Time.

  “Falcon confirms, current time is one-three-hundred,” Dade paused before asking, “Sir? What’s this all about?”

  “Stand by, Falcon, I’ll give you an update presently.” Turning to Gunny Frost, he instructed her to check with the rest of the platoon to see if anyone else had experienced a loss of time.

  When Frost returned, she informed the captain that almost three-quarters of the platoon had lost between one and ten hours, an anomaly confirmed by each man’s chrono. Two men, one a Marine and one a burn specialist on Dr. Cortez’s medical team, had not lost, but gained time. The Marine’s chrono was running forty-five minutes slow, while the doctor’s was a full ten hours behind. No one reported any persistent physical symptoms other than sore, aching muscles, and a jet-lagged feeling.

  “You know,” Cortez said after listening to Gunny Frost’s report. “I’ve heard of this sort of thing occurring once or twice since the Induction. Always to the crew of a space vessel. The experts are calling it time displacement or time distortion, although that’s all they know about it. As far as I know, this is the first time it has ever happened to someone on the ground.

  “Some people are wondering if the same phenomenon might not be responsible for lost time in supposed alien abductions.”

  “And what do you think, Doctor?” Gunny Frost asked sharply.

  “I don’t know what to think, Gunnery Sergeant.” Cortez shook her head and shrugged. “It is difficult to study a temporal phenomenon like time distortion when you’re not ready for it to happen.”

  “All right, whatever it was, it looks like nobody is the worse for wear,” Taggart cut in. “Doctor, I want you and your team to check everybody out. Make sure there are no ill effects other than this hungover feeling. Then we’re gonna reset everybody’s chrono to yours.” Taggart squinted at the pale gleaming disk of the Maw where it sat low on the western horizon. It was almost nightfall, regardless of Greenwich Mean Time. “And then, we’re all gonna get some rest, so that those of us who were affected by this time distortion of yours can recover a bit. We’ll start off again first thing in the morning.”

  10

  “Bloody frigging, hell,” Marine Private First Class Leo Kowalski swore under his breath, as he stood beneath the lip of an overhanging rock outcropping. Above him one of Cortez’s damn medics scrabbled at the scree, kicking loose a small torrent of red-brown dust and marble-sized pebbles. Kowalski turned his face away from the miniature avalanche, momentarily taking his eyes off the man he’d been assigned to baby-sit.

  Fifty meters or so behind the spot where the cursing PFC stood, the “Roman road” came to an abrupt end. Since the team had resumed the climb through the rough hills, some eight hours earlier, they had encountered a handful of places where ancient landslides had damaged the flat paved trail. One of those slides had torn away the rock supporting the paving stones, causing them to collapse into the gorge below. Fortunately, the gap in the road was only a few meters across. While it had presented an obstacle which had to be bypassed by climbing, traversing the chasm required only basic mountaineering techniques. This time, it was different.

  Here the road ended in a steep slope of broken, rocky ground. No sign of the white paving stones could be seen anywhere along the hundred-meter-long expanse of loose, broken, red-brown rock. Dotting the ancient slide area were outcroppings of multicolored crystalline rock, which seemed to grow from the crevices between the boulders like diamond, ruby, and sapphire bushes. At the top of the slope was a sheer escarpment about ten meters high, with a jutting overhang of pavement-capped rock at the top of the precipice. There was no clear evidence as to what had happened to the road at that point. The consensus was that an earthquake, such as those which shook Earth when it was “inducted” into the Maelstrom, must have twisted the fabric of the planet, tearing the road asunder, and erecting the cliff-like obstruction.

  Whatever the reason for the break in the road, it caused the rescue team a significant delay. Captain Taggart had been unwilling to expose any of the team to unnecessary risks. So the platoon’s strongest climbers went first, stringing a safety line along the steep rockslide’s treacherous slope. Then they had to climb the escarpment, which, though only ten meters high, was still a challenge to climb without an overhead belay, especially taking into account the half-meter wide overhang the climbers had to get around. Once the ropes and belays had been strung, the team began the ascent once more. A Marine with climbing experience had been detailed to watch over each of the medics. The entire operation had cost the rescue team forty-five minutes, and they weren’t done yet. Kowalski glanced at his chrono: 1156 Zulu. That meant about ninety minutes until local nightfall. Captain Taggart had decided to scale the low escarpment and bivouac at the top. Kowalski snorted in disgust. Though they would have been spending this night in the open along the narrow mountain trail, the Marine private regarded the time spent overcoming this latest obstacle as yet another delay in getting away from this godforsaken planet. With another sigh of displeasure, Kowalski returned his attention to the man he was supposed to be baby-sitting.

  PFC Kowalski, a fair hand at mountaineering, had been assigned to keep an eye on Dr. Nicholas Ziwi, one of Cortez’s trauma specialists.

  Well, he’s strong enough, Kowalski thought, dodging another mini-avalanche. But the man has absolutely no clue when it comes to climbing. Above him, Ziwi’s feet finally vanished over the outcropping.

  “Climber coming up,” Kowalski called.

  “On belay,” a voice from above answered. “Come ahead.”

  “Okay. Climbing now.”

  Shifting his heavy Bulldog support rifle into a comfortable muzzle-down position across his back, Kowalski tied himself into the climbing rope by means of the strong steel carabinier attached to his combat harness’s web belt. This stretch of the climb wasn’t especially
challenging, not technically anyway, but the sheer rock face required brute strength to haul oneself up the vertical face and across the jutting lip of the overhang.

  For a moment, Kowalski paused to catch his breath. He locked the safety rope in tight and reached up with his right hand to grasp the lip of the overhang, steadying himself, and arresting the sway that climbers often ignored until the pendulum-like motion wore through their supporting ropes. Though Kowalski, like all Marines, was in excellent physical condition, the short, vertical climb, combined with the weight of his gear and the closed combat environment suit left him a bit winded. Once his breathing calmed a bit, he was ready to continue.

  “I’m at the overhang,” he said. “Ready to go on.”

  “On belay,” came the reply. “Come ahead. Just watch yourself. The surface is getting kinda loose.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Kowalski said. “Climbing now.”

  Unlocking the brake, Kowalski reached out with his left hand and caught a narrow ledge of rock with his fingertips. With a muscle-cracking effort, he pulled himself up, hand over hand, until he could see the top of the lip. Lance Corporal Tim Henry stood a meter or so back, hanging on to the belay line. The climber grinned at his platoon mates and reached out with his left hand for the next rung of the rocky ladder.

  Then Kowalski’s right hand was suddenly empty, except for a fistful of thin, crumbling flakes of red-brown rock. The young Marine felt his combat harness catch momentarily on a projection just below the upper rim of the overhang. In the slow-motion world known only to accident victims, Kowalski saw Captain Taggart, Gunny Frost, and Dr. Ziwi, all lunge for his outstretched hands. Ziwi actually managed to touch his fingers. At that moment, the plastic quick-release buckle of Kowalski’s thick nylon combat harness gave way. The safety line held momentarily, allowing him to drop in relative safety back across the overhang. Kowalski spun and swung in space for a moment, then slammed sideways into the rock face. A rending pop in his left knee sent a galvanic wave of pain through his body. For a second, Kowalski felt he had survived the worst of it. But with the harness no longer firmly buckled around his body, the jarring impact of a ninety-kilo man carrying fourteen kilos of weapon and gear smashing into the escarpment was too much for the unfastened rig to bear.