Anyway, the reason a twenty six point two mile race is called a ‘marathon’ is that according to legend, an ancient Greek named ‘Pheidippides’ ran all the way to Athens to announce the Greek army’s victory over the Persians at a place called Marathon. No, Pheidippides wasn’t ancient, I think he was a young guy. I meant this happened in ancient Greece. Anyway, the story goes that after this Pheidippides guy reached Athens and reported the news, he collapsed and died. Apparently, he hadn’t properly hydrated along the way, because Gatorade didn’t exist yet. Which makes me wonder; the Greeks didn’t have horses? Or was Pheidippides just a macho idiot? Hey, I could ride a horse, he said, but anyone could do that. I’ll run the whole way! What a bonehead.
The point of my story is that, during the last hundred meters of his run, just before he collapsed and died, Pheidippides felt way better than I did running with the Indian paratrooper team that morning. It was a three-ralph run for me; I stopped three times to puke up whatever was left in my stomach from the night before. To my shame, I was the only one who ralphed until the sixth kilometer, when even Captain Chandra leaned to the side and upchucked. On the way back, after eight kilometers, Chandra wisely called a halt because people were stumbling, and by people I do not mean only people named ‘Joe Bishop’. The final kilometer back into camp was done at a steady jogging pace to keep up our pride.
It didn’t work. Major Smythe had been testing some of our cool Kristang recon drones, and when we got back to camp, gasping and red-faced, he strolled nonchalantly over to Chandra, showing the Indian leader a zPhone image. “Nice route you ran,” Smythe said with a tight smile, “it was good training for the drone operators.”
“You followed us?” Chandra asked, humiliated.
“Yes, the whole way.”
Chandra said some curse word in Hindi that got his team laughing.
“Don’t worry,” Smythe patted Chandra’s shoulder, “my team nearly had to carry me back yesterday.”
Hearing that made me feel better. Also, I always feel better right after I puke.
A couple days later it was my turn to fly a recon mission, this time to the west of base camp. We sent out three recon birds that day, mine was first to leave because I was super incredibly excited to be flying anything anywhere. My copilot had a bemused smile on her face throughout the preflight inspection, and our two relief pilots settled into seats in the passenger cabin still sipping cups of coffee, because I insisted we lift off at first light. The plan was for me to fly the outbound leg, then the relief pilots would take over. Our flight was not a grid search, all we wanted was to get an idea of the land beyond base camp. With the damned fuzz field creating a fog all across the electromagnetic spectrum, we at first had no idea whether base camp was on an island, or smack in the middle of a continent, or close to the coast of a vast ocean. Recon birds to the north, south and east the first two days revealed there was an ocean eight hundred kilometers to the south, and eleven hundred klicks to the east. North of us were rolling hills, swampland and a sort of tundra that was in its summer season. The flights had not seen any signs of civilization past or present which was no surprise, but Skippy cautioned us against drawing any conclusions from such limited data. With the fuzz field squelching all sensor data, the recon ships had to fly low to see the ground at all, so their visibility was limited to about a ten kilometer strip of land to either side of the flightpath. Flying low allowed the sensors in the bellies of the ships to scan the ground for anything that might help us locate an Elder conduit, it also burned a lot more fuel because the turbine engines operated less efficiently in thicker air. All dropships were a compromise design between aircraft and spacecraft, and none of them liked flying low and slowly enough for the sensors to get a useful scan of the surface.
“Anything, Skippy?” I asked after about two hours of flight time. Flying west, we had the rising sun behind us, although we were flying so slowly the sun was advancing across the landscape faster than our Dragon. Vague shadows that were long and stretched out when we took off were now shortening, as the indistinct blob of the sun climbed into the sky.
“Nothing obvious,” Skippy replied from base camp. “I can’t see much with the skimpy signal bandwidth anyway,” he complained. The only way recon flights could maintain contact with base camp, and with each other, was for the ships to eject relay pods every couple kilometers. The pods we used were a Thuranin design; Simms had found a whole crate of them aboard the Dutchman but we hadn’t used them much until we landed on Gingerbread. They were only about the size of a ping pong ball and almost as light, the things got ejected from a special port in the belly of our dropships and floated to the surface without needing parachutes. Even with pods relaying a signal all the way back to base camp, we were pretty much restricted to voice communications; Skippy couldn’t process the recorded sensor data until each dropship returned to base camp. It was annoying and frustrating and it potentially wasted a lot of time. If a dropship flew over something interesting, we wouldn’t know that until much later, and then we would need to send another bird out to more closely inspect the area.
So far, Skippy hadn’t found a conduit or anything like it, the only encouraging sign was that Gingerbread was apparently honeycombed with tunnels and caverns beneath the placid surface. If we were going to find a conduit on Gingerbread, Skippy thought it most likely would be underground. A conduit there would be protected from meteor impacts, weather, erosion of the surface, and would have access to abundant geothermal power. Meteor impacts apparently were a big problem in the Gingerbread system; we saw plenty of impact craters while we were flying around, and Skippy told us there were plenty more that weren’t obvious, being so old they had partly filled in, or covered with trees. Personally, I found meteor impact craters fascinating and asked Skippy to tell me more about them, but he was super busy weeding through sensor data to find a conduit ,and told me that my curiosity would have to wait for later.
“Ok thanks,” I replied to let him know we appreciated what little he was able to do for us. “Hey, Skippy, should we fly over this lake?” I asked as I craned my neck to see over the Dragon’s console. With Thuranin dropships, our problem was seats that were too small and ceilings that were too low for humans. And the already tiny bathrooms were extra cramped. We brought equipment from Earth to replace the seats; the low ceilings and cramped bathrooms we had to live with as best we could. A more significant problem was the cockpit controls were sized for smaller Thuranin bodies and hands, which caused problems of clumsy human fingers brushing against the wrong controls. Because the Thuranin were cyborgs who normally flew their ships through chips in their brains, they had not given a lot of thought to the physical flight controls that were considered emergency backups only.
With the Kristang dropships that we called ‘Dragons’, we had the opposite problem; most humans were too small to properly fit in the cockpit seats and use the controls without awkwardness. In the Dragon that day, Lt. Reed was in the left-hand seat, and although she was taller than average for a woman, she had the seat adjusted up and forward almost to its maximum travel. I am taller than average, being about six feet three, but the top of the copilot console in front of me cut off the lower part of the wraparound forward display that replaced vulnerable cockpit windows. To get an optimal view of the lake, I had to push myself up in my seat.
“Yes, Joe, you should fly over the lake,” Skippy snapped with irritation. “Stick to the flightplan, and leave the thinking to me. Damn, maybe I should have taped a banana to the nose of your Dragon so you would follow it?”
“You are hilarious, Skippy,” I said drily as Lt Reed’s shoulders shook with laughter. “I was thinking that being over deep water might interfere with our sensor scans.”
“Thinking? Is that what you call it? Huh. Let me give you an example of actual thinking, Joe. The lake in front of you is deep, and that is a good thing. It means below the lake there is less dirt and rock that will interfere with the sensor scans. Water is easy to
see through, and I can adjust the sensors to ignore the effects of deep water. So,” he sighed sarcastically, “if it is Ok with you, please stick to the flightplan.”
“Got it,” I replied curtly, embarrassed. “Descending to one hundred meters above the water,” I advised Reed. I was in the copilot seat, but at the moment I was Pilot In Command, primarily responsible for the flight. Reed had flown us most of the way from base camp, with most of that on autopilot. She had turned the controls over to me not because I was her commanding officer, but because most of my experience flying a Dragon had been in a simulator, and she knew I wanted stick time. Dragons did not have an actual control stick; that was an old expression we brought from Earth. Instead of a control stick or yoke, the primary flight controls were flatscreens. The middle finger of my right hand rested on a circle in the display. Pushing the circle forward made the Dragon’s nose drop; pulling the circle back lifted the nose. Banking right or left was accomplished by pushing the circle in the appropriate direction. The flight computer mostly handled coordinating the rudder for turns, although my index finger had independent rudder control, and I tried to fly manually as much as possible. My right pinky finger controlled the engine throttles; if the port and starboard engines needed to be throttled separately I could use thumb and pinky finger.
The Kristang warrior caste were hateful, murderous lizards, but they made sweet flight controls. After a day or two of getting used to controlling almost everything with one hand, I didn’t want to go back to the ironically clumsier Thuranin physical flight controls.
“Descending to one hundred meters AGL,” Reed acknowledged, letting me do all the flying. She was monitoring the sensor gear and really didn’t have much to do. Skippy remotely controlled the sensors and would tell us immediately if there was a problem that required our attention. We had the sensor pod in the belly of the Dragon actively scanning straight down to map out the underground cavern network. With the belly pod sending out powerful active pulses that could penetrate deep beneath the surface, the sensitivity of the other sensors was dialed back to prevent interference. That left us a bit more blind than normal flying procedure, and left me a bit uncomfortable. Yes, we were flying above an uninhabited planet, under a mostly clear sky, and there were no known threats. The closest air traffic was another Dragon on its way back to base, safely half an hour flight time from us. And even if all our sensor gear was operating at maximum sensitivity, the odd fuzzing field enveloping the entire planet would have limited us to seeing in a twenty three kilometer radius at best. Everything beyond that distance was indistinct and often false. Hills appeared beyond sensor range, but when we flew closer, those hills disappeared into flat marshland. Why the Elders had bothered to conceal the surface of that planet was a question Skippy could not answer. Why the Elders were continuing to conceal the surface long after they had left the galaxy behind bothered me a lot. Skippy didn’t have an answer for that question either, and I know it bothered him too. It probably bothered him a lot more than it made me uneasy. For me, the Elders were a curiosity. For Skippy, they were his heritage, and the more he examined that heritage, the less he realized he truly knew of his origin.
“Hey, what do you know?” I asked cheerily, using my left hand to point in front of us. “There is actually a lake.”
Reed grinned. In this case, the long-range sensor data through the all-encompassing fuzz field had been accurate, although some details had been false. The long-range data had showed two islands in the middle of the lake, but now we could see the lake surface was uninterrupted by any islands, except a few small rocks along the shore. Why the Elders had chosen to conceal some terrain features and display other features as they truly were, was another mystery. The basic outline of the lake was correct, as were the hills that surrounded the water. Hills on the west side to our starboard were taller and more rugged, densely covered with dark trees. The hills to the east rolled gently and the forests were dotted with irregularly-shaped meadows.
“Levelling off at one hundred meters AGL,” I declared. The lake was long and narrow but big, like what I guess a Scottish loch looked like. Thinking of lakes in Scotland, I found myself visually scanning the water for sign of a monster, then ruefully shook my head and returned my attention to the flight controls. “Sensors?”
“Nominal,” Reed reported distractedly, her focus directed to the port side display. “Sir? Those meadows. Do they look odd to you?”
“Meadows?” Until she mentioned the hillside clearings to our east, I had not given them any thought. “Uh.” At first, I couldn’t understand what she could mean. The hills were partly dark forests and lighter-colored meadows, with the meadows covering more land down toward the lake. Farther south along the lake shore, the forests fell away to form isolated groves of trees and treelines between meadows. It was odd. Whatever was growing in the meadows was a sort of grass or shrub, anywhere from light green to bright yellow in color. That wasn’t what I found odd. What was odd, what was unnatural, was that each meadow contained only one type of plant. Real meadows were scattered with a random variety of plants.
And real meadows didn’t have treelines acting as windbreaks between fields of crops.
“Those are not meadows,” I said with alarm. “That’s cropland!” As I spoke, my pinky finger advanced the throttles and I pulled the nose up.
Too late.
“Missile warning!” Reed shouted as her fingers flew over the controls, killing the active sensor pulses, engaging the stealth field, shields and defensive maser turrets. If we had a couple more seconds for those systems to warm up, it might have helped. As we did not have extra seconds, a missile exploded below and behind us, sending shrapnel ripping into the belly, both wings and both engines. The impact tossed the tail high in the air and for a moment, the Dragon hung vertically in the air, before the nose plunged straight down. We were lucky the dropship hadn’t flipped over on its back upside down in the air. Lt. Reed with my clumsy help managed to use the last thrust from the shredded engine turbines to level out our flight before we hit the water hard. The Dragon bounced twice hard, the impacts making my head rattle in the helmet, then the stricken craft skidded across the water, slowing rapidly. The nose dug into the water one last time with an explosion of white foam rushing over the cockpit displays before they cut out, then we shuddered to a halt.
“Holy shit!” I shouted as I pulled off my now-useless helmet.
“Everyone out!” Reed shouted more usefully. “We’re sinking!”
In the cockpit, we could not use the ejection seats, because the ejection system in a Kristang ‘Dragon’ dropship pushed the pilot and copilot seats downward, and there was a whole lot of water beneath us. Attempting to eject would result in Reed and I being crushed by impact with the water, the ejection system was probably smart enough to refuse to activate anyway. “Right behind you,” I acknowledged, struggling with the balky harness latch.
“You first, Sir,” Reed hesitated though she was already free of her seat.
“That’s an order, Reed,” I barked as the stubborn harness latch freed itself. The cockpit door was behind her anyway, she would have had to wait for me to slip by her and that made no sense. Following orders, she staggered out the door, with water rushing in already ankle-deep. When I got my head around the door frame, I could see why. Our two relief pilots, sensibly not waiting for an engraved invitation to abandon ship, had engaged the emergency explosives to blow the starboard side door open and were already outside the Dragon. Perched precariously on the stubby starboard wing, they were shouting and gesturing for us to hurry, as the cabin was one third full of water and more was pouring in from cracks in the portside hull. The Dragon, which had initially come to rest slightly nose-down, was now tilting to the rear rapidly. “Go!” I shouted to Reed right in front of me, and we both struggled through the cold knee-deep water, clutching seatbacks and staggering along as fast as we could. Reed hesitated as she got a couple fingers on the railing by the door, looking back at
me. “Go!” I repeated. “You’re in my way,” I added, appealing to her logic.
She saw the sense in going first, holding onto the railing and reaching up with the other for someone outside to grasp. Whoever it was held her right hands with both of his, and pulled her up and out. She almost made it, but just as her shoulders reached the doorframe, the Dragon tilted violently, sinking sharply down by the rear. The dropship stood on its tail and a crack in the starboard hull split open wide, letting in a jet of cold lake water. I lost my grip on a chair and fell face-first into the water, bashing my left shoulder on a submerged seat. Choking and gasping, I flailed my arms wildly and ineffectively, being tossed around like a rag doll as the heavy Dragon spun on its tail and plunged downward. Dark water swirled and bounced me around so I couldn’t tell which direction was up until I suddenly could hear loud noises no longer muffled by water.
When my head popped above the water, I saw one of Reed’s feet splash, then she was out the door that was completely underwater. The surging water carried me upward toward the cockpit and smacked my head on the forward bulkhead. Dazed, I tried to suck in a lungful of air so I could swim down to the open side door. I got half a mouthful of air and half a mouthful of water, and when I tried to swim downward, the inflowing water forced me back up against the forward bulkhead. Seeing no other option, I felt my way to the cockpit door, where the water pushed me in, nearly tearing my right arm off.
The cockpit still had red emergency lighting on, allowing me to blearily see the door controls. I slapped the button and to my amazement, the door closed almost all the way. Next to the door was a recessed crank that I pulled out, grinding harder and harder. Something was wrong with the door; the frame or track might have been warped by the crash. It took all my might to force the manual crank the last two turns, with my injured right arm screaming agony. Then the door sealed and water stopped flowing in.
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 27
