David Sherman & Dan Cragg - [Starfist 14]

by Double Jeopardy (lit)

  CYNTHIA CHANG-STURDEVANT

  PRESIDENT

  CONFEDERATION OF HUMAN WORLDS

  Cukayla read the directive, took the comp from Sturgeon’s hand, read it again, returned the comp, and looked the Marine in the eye.

  “How do I know that’s not a forgery?” he demanded. “Any halfway competent comp operator could cobble up a document like that.”

  “Are you impugning my character, Mr. Cukayla?” Borland held up a hand to forestall Cukayla’s reply. “You can print it out and check the watermark, if you like. It would take someone far more than halfway competent to forge that. Or you can send a message off to Fargo and wait for a reply while you’re sitting in the Grandar Bay’s brig.”

  “You wouldn’t, you couldn’t!”

  “I would, and I can.” Borland paused to study the other’s face for a moment. “If you’re thinking of resisting by force, how many armed people do you have in Base Camp just now? Brigadier Sturgeon has a hundred and sixty Confederation Marines present, and the rest of his FIST is ready to make planetfall. I strongly suggest that you comply with my legitimate requests and that you do so immediately.”

  Cukayla studied Borland’s face right back, and concluded that, upper-body musculature aside, the officer was perfectly capable of winning any contest of arms between them. But he wasn’t about to simply give in.

  “I want a printout.”

  “Certainly. You have every right to a printout.”

  Cukayla reached for the comp, which still had the directive displayed. Borland let him take it.

  Cukayla handed it to Paska and said, “Print this for me, Johnny.” Paska attempted to network it to a printer.

  “Mr. Cukayla, it doesn’t want to transmit to the printer.”

  “Basic security,” Borland said. “Captain Chriss, would you please?” he said to the FIST’s acting operations officer.

  “Aye aye, sir.” Chriss took the comp from Paska and tapped in a few commands. In seconds the printer spat out the hard copy. He returned the comp to the Commodore while Paska handed the printout to Cukayla.

  Cukayla held the printout to a light, looked at the watermark, and shook his head. “My printer isn’t supposed to be able to do this,” he said. “I guess your directive is for real.” He looked at Borland. “Don’t ask me to tell you anything that will compromise my mission.”

  “I’m afraid your operation is in suspension. Order your men to stand down.”

  “Look, Commodore, what we’re doing here is all aboveboard. I’ve got copies of the permits from the appropriate agencies on Opal. I even have a couple of permits from the Confederation government.”

  “Then you’ll have no problem with giving us copies of the permits, will you?” Borland said.

  Cukayla gave him a hard stare, then snarled “Give ’em to him” at Paska.

  While Cukayla’s number two was getting copies of the permits, Sturgeon resumed the questioning. “We have reports that the Fuzzies are using some sort of acid weapons. Elucidate.”

  Cukayla looked blankly at Sturgeon. “Acid? They don’t have any kind of acid weapons.” He paused, then added, “Unless you’re thinking of the gas bombs they have.”

  Sturgeon gestured with his hand: Keep talking.

  “They sometimes set booby traps. When they’re set off, they spray some kind of mist into the air. It burns on contact. Horribly. If you breathe it in, it eats your lungs out.”

  “Where’d they get the gas?”

  Cukayla shook his head. “Made it themselves? I don’t know.”

  “The Fuzzies are sounding less and less like smart animals.”

  Cukayla gave Sturgeon a suspicious look. “Smart like chimpanzees,” he said.

  “You already said that. Maybe smarter than chimps?”

  Cukayla shrugged. “Maybe a little smarter.”

  “They’d have to be, if they can figure out how to use firearms.”

  Borland raised his eyebrows at “smart like chimpanzees.” But he didn’t comment. “For now,” he said, “you have to shut down your mining operations—as a security measure. Let the Marines deal with the raids. They’re expert at that, and you won’t lose any more of your employees. We’ll settle matters as quickly as we can.”

  “I require maps showing the location of every one of your mines, including mines that are no longer active, and mines that you plan to establish. Also showing the locations of every burrow you know about,” Sturgeon said.

  There wasn’t much more to be said after Cukayla had digital maps transmitted to Sturgeon’s comp, so Sturgeon and Borland left the administration building, Borland to return to the Grandar Bay, Sturgeon to establish a base of operations for his FIST. Sturgeon was to name it Camp Usner, after the FIST operations officer who had been killed in action on Haulover.

  Cukayla and Paska sat silently for a few moments once they were alone again, before Cukayla said, “Nothing gets shut down. As soon as our new men arrive, we’ll double or triple the garrison at each mine.”

  “Let’s hope they don’t look too hard at those permits,” Paska said softly.

  Cukayla snorted. “The permits are good enough. They won’t be able to find anything amiss.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A hopper dropped Thirty-fourth FIST’s recon squad’s second team in a small clearing fifteen kilometers from what was identified as a burrow belonging to a Fuzzy rebel force.

  Brigadier Sturgeon and his staff had studied the maps provided by Sharp Edge and compared them with data gleaned by the Grandar Bay’s Surveillance and Radar Division.

  The mining operations were easy to pick out once they knew what to look for: blocks of cages lined up behind clapboard buildings, all surrounded by aboveground bunkers. They were all in the foothills and lower slopes of mountain ranges. Active mines showed signs of current occupancy, occasional guards or Fuzzies moving about. Inactive mines betrayed no sign of anybody present, and tumbled debris lay about.

  The rebel burrows were harder to spot. Unless Fuzzies were seen disappearing into the ground, the only indication of the burrows was faint trails all terminating at the same spot. Sturgeon wasn’t prepared to seriously think of the Fuzzies as mere smart animals. That was a major reason for sending out the reconnaissance squad; he wanted to find out more about them. He’d never heard of an animal that decked itself with straps and pouches for carrying things. Maybe the Fuzzies weren’t as intelligent as H. sapiens, but he strongly suspected that they qualified as sentient.

  If possible, the recon teams were to penetrate the burrows. If possible, they were to capture a Fuzzy and bring it back for navy scientists to examine and test.

  If.

  But only if entering a burrow or capturing a Fuzzy wouldn’t alert the Fuzzies to the presence of men they couldn’t see. According to Louis Cukayla and his top people, the Fuzzies saw in the same visible spectrum that humans did. But Sturgeon wasn’t any more prepared to accept the word of Sharp Edge about the Fuzzies on that than he was to accept their assessment that they were “merely” smart animals, not even animals maybe a little smarter than chimpanzees. On Earth, humans had trained animals to do a variety of jobs as far back as the Paleolithic Age, but Sturgeon had never heard of helper animals digging holes and bringing gems out of them for their human masters. Or using firearms, or explosives, or poison gas, whether they got them from humans or made the weapons themselves. The Fuzzies might be able to see into the infrared or the ultraviolet. Their snouts indicated that they had a well-developed sense of smell, more than humans did, and the size of their eyes suggested they could see better in the dark than a human with unaided vision.

  The four recon men cautiously approached their assigned burrow. They spread out as they neared it until they were on a line a hundred and fifty meters wide. The particular burrow they were checking was one that Sharp Edge said was unoccupied, its Fuzzies taken to work in a mine a couple of hundred kilometers away. The Grandar Bay’s Surveillance and Radar Division reported recent act
ivity at the burrow so it was suspected of being a base for the rebels. Each of the Marines had a detailed map of the area that he could access in his heads-up display. A bit more than half a kilometer from the burrow, each of them encountered a trail.

  “Hold,” Sergeant Saber ordered. In addition to the HUD map stored on his comp, he was tied in real-time with the string-of-pearls satellite display of the area and with one of the S and R techs on board the Grandar Bay.

  He saw no indication of people moving on the display from the string-of-pearls. Not that that meant anything; he couldn’t see his own men, either—their chameleons’ infra-damping effect cut their heat signatures down too far for his equipment to make out. “I’m going upstairs for more intel,” he told his men. Saber was a few meters from a tree that towered above its neighbors by a good three or four meters, and looked sturdy enough to support his weight close to the height of the surrounding trees. He climbed it as high as he dared and located the position of the Grandar Bay.

  “Sky-Eye, this is Sneaker Two,” he radioed, and repeated his call.

  “Sneaker Two, this is Sky-Eye,” came the voice of Surface Radar Analyst 2 Hummfree. Hummfree hadn’t yet gotten over being recalled to active duty and assignment to a starship that had supposedly been lost in Beam Space. But the reported Beam Space disappearance had been rescinded so he got some occasional planet-side liberty, which helped. So did his almost instantaneous promotion. The main thing he had to do now was clear up with that SRA2 Auperson that he was the better analyst. After all, it had been Hummfree, not Auperson, who had figured out how to track the Skinks when the Marines had first encountered them on Waygone, Society 437. “I have you one hundred and fifty meters from your target,” he said. “All four blips.”

  “Sky-Eye, is anybody nearby?”

  “That’s a negative, Sneaker Two. I’ve been watching for the past hour and haven’t seen any man-size traces.”

  “They’re smaller than us, Sky-Eye.”

  “Not that much smaller. Do you know what a dik-dik is?”

  “It’s a kind of miniature antelope, isn’t it?”

  “You got it. And that’s the size of the biggest thing I’ve seen.”

  “We’re going in closer.”

  “Go safely, Sneaker Two. I’ve got your back.”

  “Roger, Sky-Eye. Sneaker Two out.” Saber climbed out of the tree and contacted his men. “Sky-Eye says nobody’s near. Let’s check it out. Stay ten meters off the trails until we have the burrow in sight. Acknowledge.” He waited for his men to acknowledge, then said, “Move out.”

  Half an hour later, Saber squatted down with the entrance to the burrow in sight less than fifty meters away. It didn’t look like much, just a hole scooped at an angle out of the ground, barely high enough for the Marines to enter, even crouched over. He checked with his men. They could also see the entrance and were halted, looking in different directions so that among them they could see all approaches to the burrow. He used his sniffer, but not to learn anything about the current presence or absence of Fuzzies in the area. The Marines had no data on the chemical signals of the Fuzzies for the sniffer to tell him anything from the chemicals that it collected drifting in the air. He used the sniffer to begin building a database.

  After a quarter hour of observation, Saber rose to his feet and said into his comm, “Let’s do it. Sonj, me, Hagen, and Soldatcu.” He slid his infra into place so he could see his men as they approached the burrow’s entrance. When he saw the red blur that indicated Corporal Sonj, he followed. He turned his helmet’s ears all the way up so he could hear the footsteps of Lance Corporal Hagen fall in behind him, and then Corporal Soldatcu trailing. Ten meters from the entrance, he dropped what looked like a broken branch on the ground. It was a transceiver with an antenna; hopefully it would relay messages between him and Sky-Eye while the Marines were inside the burrow. The Marines slid light-gatherer screens into place as they passed into the entrance.

  Saber wished he could have sent a minnie in ahead, but the Marines didn’t know what kind of small animal could enter a burrow without raising an alarm, so for this mission the recon teams had to go without.

  The entry tunnel was barely wide enough for the Marines to walk along without brushing its sides. Less than a meter from the surface, the ground was compacted from the weight of the looser dirt on top and from having all its water sucked out by the vegetation that grew mostly in that top layer. The tunnel’s floor was hard enough that ruts had been worn into it from generations of feet moving along it. For the first twenty meters, the tunnel’s downward path was straight and unadorned. Then it made an abrupt sixty-degree turn to the right, and its angle steepened, so the Marines had to be careful of how they placed their feet to keep from slipping and falling. The boots they wore, soft soled for silent stepping, aided here as well, as they more easily gripped the smooth surface of the tunnel floor.

  “I can still see,” Sonj said. “Much better than I expected.”

  Saber realized he could see better than expected as well. He raised his light-gatherer. A dull glow suffused the tunnel, which was also getting wider and higher—almost enough for them to walk with ducked heads rather than in a full crouch. He looked at the overhead and saw faint lines drawn along its length, the source of the faint light.

  “Hagen, use your own eyes. Take a sample of that light-emitting stuff—a small sample.”

  “Aye aye,” Hagen answered. Saber heard a scraping as Hagen did as he was told.

  “Bioluminescence?” Soldatcu asked. He’d also raised his light-gatherer.

  “Maybe. We’ll let the scientists in orbit figure it out.”

  The slope of the tunnel leveled out to the same angle it had before the turn, and now small alcoves appeared in its sides, each just big enough to hold two of the Fuzzies. The tunnel continued to widen and grow higher to where the Marines were able to walk erect, although they still had to be careful not to bump the overhead with their helmets.

  “Got a big glow ahead,” Sonj said some seventy-five meters from the entrance to the burrow. “The tunnel takes another turn up ahead, and it’s bright beyond that.”

  “Approach with caution,” Saber said.

  Sonj reached the next bend in the tunnel and cautiously looked around it. He gave out a low whistle. “You gotta see this, boss.”

  “What do you have?” Saber joined his point man at the bend. Sonj squatted to allow his team leader to look over his head.

  Saber sucked in a chestful of air and blew it out. “We need to get a closer look,” he said after a few minutes of watching without seeing movement.

  What they saw was a spreading cavern with a level floor and an even overhead about four and a half meters above. Five meters from the bend was the beginning of what looked like a three-meter-wide street, along which sat structures that went from floor to overhead and melded into both. The structures had openings like doors and windows facing the street, and there were spaces between that might be cross streets. The overhead was run with lines like those in the tunnel, enough to give about the same light as a heavily overcast day. The temperature in the cavern was ten degrees cooler than on the surface.

  “Move out,” Saber said. Sonj did, and he followed. Behind him, he heard gasps from Hagen and Soldatcu as they made the turn and saw what Saber now thought of as an underground town.

  Immediately before the first of the structures, another, gently curving street ran off to either side. It was difficult to judge in the confined space of the cavern, but it looked to Saber like it ran close to a quarter of a kilometer in each direction. Structures with window and door openings fronted it.

  “Sonj, Soldatcu, check out the structure on the right,” Saber ordered. “Don’t stay inside long, and don’t disturb anything. Hagen, with me.” He led the other into the structure on the left.

  Inside, the structure was obviously a house, even though it was dug out of and into the stonelike ground. The first level was one large room, with low benches that m
ight have been used for sitting or sleeping. Luminous lines in the ceiling gave the room more light than there was on the street. Curtains of some gossamer material hung in the windows. Wood shelving was built along one wall. The shelves held baskets, and fired clay vases and pots. Some of the pots held water; none had food. A few rats’ nests of what looked like leather might have been more of the strap and pouch arrangement the Fuzzies had worn in the 2-D images the recon Marines had examined in preparation for the mission. There was a stack of objects that looked suspiciously like books. Saber went close to examine it and picked up the top object. It was about forty sheets of thin material that could have been parchment or inner bark lining—and every sheet was covered with markings, which he could only explain as writing. So excited he was trembling, Saber took pics of the object, both the exterior and the first several pages.

  “No way the Fuzzies are just clever animals, no matter what the mercs say,” he murmured. Wishing to the depths of his soul that he could take one of the books, he replaced the one he had imaged and continued looking around.

  In a corner away from the entrance, a stairway so steep it was almost a ladder led upward. He climbed it. The floor between the two levels was thick, almost a meter. The upper level had no luminating lines in the ceiling and was more heavily curtained than the downstairs windows, so that little light seeped in. Saber slid his light-gatherer into place to look around. The room held four padded platforms, and shelves along one wall held what looked like bed linen, though it was cloth of a kind he didn’t recognize. Again, he wanted to take a sample, although not as badly as he’d wanted to take one of the Fuzzy books. He settled for taking images.

  Back downstairs he took more images, then he and Hagen left the house.

  “We didn’t see anything that looked like a head,” Sonj said after reporting what he and Soldatcu had found—the same that Saber and Hagen had.

  “Maybe they’ve got communal heads,” Saber said. “Or maybe they do their business outside. Let’s look some more, I don’t want to be down here much longer.”