Lieutenant (The United Federation Marine Corps Book 3)

by Jonathan P. Brazee

  “Yeah, Rabbit, everything came out just fine,” Ryck answered.

  With a long drop ahead of them, and in very, very close confinement, each Marine had been given an impact laxative to evacuate their bowels as well as a glucose bomb to raise caloric levels without bulk. The shit buster injection started working within five minutes and usually completed its function within 30. Ryck was pretty sure he had run the course and was now squeaky clean, at least on the inside.

  Except for Sgt Rogers, the rest of the Marines were in the holding space, ready for their drop. Ryck put his back against the bulkhead and slid to a sitting position. As team leader, he’d been busy in briefings and mission planning. Now, with the drop imminent, he was just one more team member. Each two-man team had a separate mission and drop location, and it would be essentially impossible for him to exert any command control on the other teams.

  Rogers finally came out of the head, still pulling up his flight suit trou, showing the team and Navy crew that he was going commando.

  “Hell, Jolly, how about covering up that thing before coming out?” Gunny Heang asked. “We don’t need that flapping in our faces before a drop.”

  Sgt Rogers didn’t say anything, but slowed down, slowly zipping up, leaving himself exposed until the last moment. He had to wheel away suddenly and finish as Sams threw a glove at him, aiming for his crotch.

  There had always been a degree of grab-ass and smack-talk before any of Ryck’s previous operations, but this time, his team seemed pretty calm and relaxed. Ryck was outwardly just as relaxed, but inwardly, he had a few butterflies. He wondered if his last regen had affected him, making him a little more nervous.

  Finally, the Navy chief gave the signal. The Marines got to their feet, did one last weapons check, then wandered over to the duck eggs. Ryck and Sams were in the second egg. Ryck let his teammate slide in, giving him the husband position.

  As Sams wiggled in, Ryck felt he should say something, but the men knew their mission, and wishing good luck was bad juju according to recon tradition.

  He settled for yelling out, “Get tight, but don’t do anything we wouldn’t do!” before starting to slide into the wife position in the egg.

  The hoots and hollers from the others, with “What we do in private ain’t no one’s business,” and “But Buttercup is just so girly-cute,” let Ryck know he’d hit the right note.

  Ryck slid into position, his face just centimeters away from Sams’ crotch and his crotch in Sams’ face. When they hit the planet’s atmosphere, Ryck would be head down with regards to the planet’s surface, hence the term “wife position.”

  The Inert Atmospheric Insertion Capsule, the “duck egg,” was a very small capsule designed to insert one or two men from space to a planet’s surface. Inside, it was tiny, barely big enough for two men to fit. They could be configured back-to-front, or “spooning,” or facing each other, but face-to-foot. This, not surprisingly, was “69’ing.”

  The four capsules for the insert would be inserted into a larger inert shell, which would be aimed at the planet. This outer shell was designed to ablate away as it entered the atmosphere, breaking up as a meteor might. The four duck eggs, along with decoy components, would separate to follow pre-designated paths to the target planet. The duck egg surfaces were designed to ablate away as well, slowing it down some before ejecting the Marines into the atmosphere some 10,000 meters above the planet’s surface.

  The Marines would still be travelling quite fast, so a tight body position was a must. An arm could be ripped off before the flight suit baffles could take effect. At around 7,000 meters, the foil would deploy, allowing the Marines to navigate and descend to their actual insertion point.

  All of this was done without any emissions. The entire evolution was mechanical. Oxygen for the trip was in chest tanks. No food would be taken, and while each Marine had a piss tube, there was no way to take a shit (which was the reason for the bowel evacuation). More importantly, there were no comms, either with higher headquarters or each other. It was possible for two Marines in the same duck egg to shout out to each other and be heard, but generally, it was silence for the entire insertion.

  Ryck had made two training insertions, the longest one being eight hours. This one was calculated at 30 hours. No one was sure as to the capys’ space surveillance capabilities, so no chances were being taken.

  “You ready in there?” the yellow-shirted petty officer asked while looking in.

  Ryck could feel Sams reach around him to give the thumbs up. The blood was going to his head, and he wanted the release of null gravity.

  “OK, I’m closing up,” the petty officer said. “God’s speed.”

  The light was cut off as the side of the egg was put back and the seams sealed. Ryck could feel the duck egg shift as it was moved into position. With several minutes of jerking back and forth, Ryck’s position was shifted until he was slightly on his side instead of straight upside down. It wasn’t much of an improvement.

  In the darkness, Ryck could only try to interpret the movements to try to understand what was happening. It wasn’t until Ryck felt the pressure of the ejection from the ship and the shift to null grav that he knew they were finally on the way.

  Thirty hours in complete darkness, without communicating, made it difficult to estimate the passing of time. The blood thinners they’d all been given to combat deep vein thrombosis had the side effect of keeping them more alert, so Ryck was lost in his thoughts. Many of those thoughts centered on Hannah. He’d cammed with her the day before, and she’d seemed almost normal, if you forgot the fact that they were husband and wife, not merely acquaintances. There were none of the little affections a married couple might use. Ryck didn’t know where they stood, but he still had hopes that they could get back together.

  Despite the drugs, Ryck might have fallen asleep. When the duck egg started vibrating, it seemed shorter than 30 hours. But vibration meant atmosphere, and that meant they were getting close.

  The vibration turned to shaking. Ryck strained his eyes, trying to pick up the glow of entry. If he saw it, though, before his duck egg was cast free, it would be a very bad sign.

  Sams shifted beside him. He’d been very still during the transit, barely moving. Now, he was showing signs of life.

  The shaking became violent, and Ryck had to brace himself to keep from being slammed about. There was a small, padded paper harness between the two Marines, but twice, Sams smashed into Ryck, once strong enough and in a location where Ryck would have doubled up if he had the space to do so.

  When the duck egg broke free, Ryck was sure he felt the difference. The extreme violence abated a few degrees while vibration increased. Ryck became aware of a dull sound growing, penetrating his helmet. Not sure at first, Ryck began to see a glow as the egg’s outer layers burned away. They would have between a five- and ten-second warning before they were ejected, but Ryck pulled his arms in and tightened up his legs. He’d done it too early, though, and he had just started to relax again when the longitudinal vents began to split, just as the flames started to die out.

  Ryck quickly tensed up again, straining to get into position. Ryck’s side of the egg split first, followed a fraction of a second by Sams’. This tiny difference kept them from slamming into each other. The shock of hitting the atmosphere was huge, despite the ablative slowing of the capsule. Ryck had been ready, but his position was almost flung apart. The helmet and the top of his flight suit kept his neck intact, but it could have been possible for him to suffer severe injury to his extremities. Ryck managed to keep his position, though, and within a few moments, he had stabilized. Slowly, and as taught, he extended into the age-old freefall position and started the next phase of the long insertion.

  They had entered the atmosphere over daylight, but by the time they had ejected from the egg, Ryck and Sams had travelled into night. Ryck could see the light on the horizon, but beneath him, the planet was shrouded in darkness. Ryck glanced around, but he couldn�
�t see Sams. He had to trust that their systems would not only get them down, but get them both down together at their objective.

  The deployment of the foil was done mechanically. There was an emergency ripcord, but if he had to resort to that, he would be hopelessly off course and beyond any link-up with Sams. Ryck knew he had to rely on the equipment given to him, but free falling above a dark planet did nothing for depth perception, and he kept wondering if he had fallen too far. He was getting closer to using the ripcord when his foil deployed, and he was jerked to a steady descent.

  The shock of the chute deployment pulled down a helmet overlay in front of his eyes. This was a clever designed developed by luxury watchmakers back on Utopia. All Ryck had to do was line up the horizon on the overlay with the real horizon, then keep the foil along the indicated glide path. How it kept adjusting to his descent, without any electronics, was beyond Ryck’s comprehension. It had worked back during training on Tarawa and Johnston Landing, so Ryck simply accepted that it would work on HAC-440.

  As he got closer to the ground, he could begin to make out features. First it was a hill to his left, then trees.

  TREES!

  Ryck swore under his breath as he tried to wheel his foil to the right. It was no use. He hit the trees, the branches grabbing at him, but not stopping his fall until he slammed into something big. He immediately grabbed onto the trunk, stopping his fall. He completed a quick self-check, but he was OK. Nothing seemed broken. Looking over his shoulder, he tried to see the ground, but in the darkness, it was out of sight.

  Carefully, he unhooked his foil harness. It would disintegrate into its component molecules within an hour, so he could just leave it hanging there in the treetops. He was now unsupported. If he fell, nothing would stop him except the ground. Reaching into his cargo pocket, he pulled out a pair of gloves and put them on. Then, reaching around, he grasped the trunk and slowly began to ease his way down, hugging the tree for dear life. He inched his way down, once having to go back up a meter as he came down straddling a branch.

  His senses were on full alert as he descended. Any capy out there would have him dead to rights. Finally, he could make out the ground. Another two meters, and he would be down.

  “’Bout time you made it,” Sams whispered from out of the darkness.

  That was a relief. The system worked. They had made it down together.

  Ryck slid down the last meter, placing his feet on the planet’s surface.

  The easy part was over. Now they had work to do.

  Chapter 18

  Ryck pulled the sheet of plaspage out of his cargo pocket and looked at it for at least the dozenth time. His sense of direction was keeping him on track, but the map printed on the sheet was low res, taken from a visual image captured some 100,000 or more kilometers away and transposed over an old, but far more detailed planetary survey. The survey had been done close to 50 standard years ago by a Deep Space Agency scout team. The overlay had been done less than six months ago by a Navy picket-skiff. It showed what looked to be both herds of the capy minors as well as buildings where nothing had been before. The buildings Ryck could recognize. The capy minors? Ryck had to take the experts word on that. They could easily have been cows, sheep, or any number of other animals that gathered in herds.

  Ryck and Sams had been moving carefully in the ancient forest for seven hours, all senses on alert. They hadn’t spoken a word to each other, relying on hand-and-arm signals the few times it had been necessary.

  Ryck could see the forest lightening up ahead. That had to be the start of the large, open basin that ran up to the mountains some 40 klicks ahead. This basin was one of the places where the picket-skiffs had spotted capys.

  The basin was protected on three sides by steep mountains, and on the fourth side by the forest and a lower coastal range of hills. If the capy minors were livestock, as many of the experts surmised, then the basin made a nice, natural ranch. There was water, forage, and a means to keep them stationary.

  Ryck held up his hand, and then spread three fingers. Sams nodded, understanding that it was 300 meters to the open grasslands. The trees were thinning out, changing from the huge giants to smaller, younger specimens of the planet’s version of trees. About 15% of all known planets had something that looked and functioned as trees, so while the individual specimens were unique, the fact that there were trees on the planet was nothing extremely out of the ordinary. Xenobotanists would be interested, but to Ryck, they were just trees, scientific classification be damned.

  Ryck was tempted to turn on his monocle. For such a small piece of electronics, it had a pretty powerful AI and sensing capabilities. He could use it to sweep the area ahead of him in any number of spectrums to try and pick up the capys. In his PICS, this would have been SOP

  [37]. In recon though, he was supposed to be a ghost, and without understanding the capy’s capabilities, he was to turn on his monocle only as a last resort.

  He motioned to Sams to get down, and the two of them low-crawled the last 300 meters, taking two hours to get to the edge of the treeline. Ryck’s knees and elbows ached despite the crawl pads, but he forced the discomfort into a small corner in his mind. He stopped behind some sort of 3-meter fleshy plant that had no Terran equivalent that Ryck knew of, and pulled out the old binos he’d been issued. The normal recon visual glasses could be powered up for higher magnification, light amplification, and resolution enhancement. These were glass and light, nothing more.

  He could see the capys with his bare eyes, and it took him only a moment to acquire them through the binos. These were the minors—the same kind as those the farmers had killed off, the same kind now in more than a few zoos. The meter-long animals were in a large herd, slowly cropping the local grass. From a quick guesstimate, Ryck figured there had to close to 2,000 of them, moving en masse. How the ones in the back got any grass to eat was hard to fathom.

  The fact that they could eat the grass, and evidently receive sustenance, was pretty surprising. They were not on the planet during the initial survey 50-odd years ago, and it was pretty evident that this was not their home world. The existence of the capys on the planet was still classified, but scientists had been brought in, and one postulation was that the sentient capys had seeded this world as an investment in the future. Ryck, though, agreed with those that felt the little capys simply had robust digestive tracks. They had eaten Terran crops on GKN, and the specimens in the zoos seemed to do well on what their keepers fed them.

  “What the fuck is that?” Sams whispered beside him.

  “Where?”

  “Past the herd, another 400 meters, at our two o’clock.”

  Ryck glassed over, picking up two buildings of some sort that looked like foam igloos. They’d seen the photos taken from the Navy ships, but those had been pretty low-resolution due to the distance from which they’d been taken. Seeing them up close was pretty interesting, but why was Sams so surprised?

  Then he saw it. A huge, broad-shouldered creature walked on four legs in front of one of the buildings. It bent down, and then effortlessly stood upright on its hind legs with a large rock in its hands (paws?). As Ryck studied it, the obvious similarities spoke of a common evolution to the capy minors and majores. It had the same capybara-like appearance. It had the three eyes that the other two capys had. It was covered in a dense fur. But there, the similarities ended. This guy had to be twice the size of the soldier capys, and even at this distance, it moved in a way that spoke power. The rock it carried had to weigh 400 kg, but it hadn’t phased the thing in the least.

  “St Chuck’s hell, look at the size of it,” Ryck whispered.

  “You see the belt?” Sams asked him.

  Sams was right. The giant capy had a belt of some kind with things dangling from it. All of this bespoke intelligence.

  Are there two sentient species of them? Ryck wondered.

  Both Marines watched the big guy until it disappeared from sight down a depression.

  �
�They never told us nothin’ about no other capys,” Sams said, sounding peeved.

  “They haven’t told us much of anything. I’m guessing this is as much a surprise to everyone as it is to us,” Ryck responded.

  All the briefs the Marines had were as much conjecture as anything else. Once, two scientist-types had actually grabbed each other on the stage and started to tussle over a difference of opinion.

  What was known was that the trinocular minor, the little capys, were within earth-normal range of body temperature and respiration, and they had a circulatory system that almost mirrored that of earth-based life. Due to trace metals, the capys’ blood was somewhat blue, but it acted in the same way to transport oxygen to the blood. The most amazing thing about them was that they were so close to earth biology. Many scientists took that as proof of some long-past mutual genesis—parallel evolution seemed too far-fetched and explanation to them.

  There were differences though, the most notable being the three eyes. The lower two functioned in the same way as Terran eyes, and within much of the same wavelengths as a dog’s. The third eye, higher on the forehead, was not as well-developed, and its similarity to the ampullae of Lorenzini that sharks used as electroreceptors meant that the capys could probably sense bioelectronics. Initial tests supported that theory, but those tests were not conclusive.

  Two more of the giant capys ambled into sight. They sat back on their haunches and seemed to be communicating. The one on the right lifted on foreleg, and with a human-like gesture, pointed back in the direction that the first one had taken. Ryck could have sworn the second nodded, just as a person would have. It got up, trotted to the building, then picked up a rock bigger than the first one had lifted, and walking upright, carried it off. The one that had pointed simply sat still, an immense hunk of muscle and flesh. Ryck wished he could peer into the thing’s mind.