With Skippy remotely controlling the balloons, alternately inflating and deflating them, he kept me at an altitude where the air was breathable, and I literally hung out in the sky until the lake and the hills around it faded out of view into the hazy fuzz of the stealth field. At that point, I gave permission for a Falcon to drop down to retrieve me. They caught the tether smoothly on the first try, but with multiple tethers wrapped around each other, my ride up into the open rear ramp of the Falcon was rough. Like, super rough; my brain got bounced around in my skull so hard I was totally useless during the procedure.
Finally, I was safely inside the Falcon, being held by two crewman, and the back ramp swung closed.
“How are you, S- ooh.” The crewman wrinkled his nose.
“I’m fine.” Inside the confines of the dropship, I could smell myself. It was not pleasant. In fact, I almost gagged on the stench. The mud and nasty whatever else clinging to my flightsuit had partly dried while I dangled beneath the balloons, now the smell was concentrated. I had an odor like I’d rolled in cow manure combined with rotting fish. “Yeah,” I replied, “sorry about the smell. Ugh, it’s pretty bad.”
“That smell is just Joe’s cologne,” Skippy chuckled. “I told him that Chanel Number Two was a bad choice, but he didn’t listen to me.”
Breathing through his mouth to avoid smelling me, the crewman looked me over. As I had no obviously broken bones, he asked “Can I get you anything, Sir?”
“My father used to take Advil and bourbon. He called it Badvil. Got any of that?”
Despite the stench I was making in the confined dropship cabin, that drew a smile from him. “Advil maybe. We do have,” he nodded toward a bundle, “a change of clothes. And a washroom.”
I took the hint. We tossed my old flightsuit out at fifteen thousand meters. I was sad to see it go, as it had saved my life. But, damn, no way were we ever getting that smell out of the fabric.
Adams greeted me at the bottom of the ramp when my dropship landed, and while she snapped a salute to me, it looked like she’d been crying and I could have sworn she wanted to hug me. Maybe somehow I had fallen into a bizarre parallel universe. “Sergeant,” I returned the salute and gave her big, genuine smile, “I hear you gave Skippy a pep talk while I was at the bottom of a lake?”
“It was more of a pep slap, Sir,” she responded with a wink.
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”
I took a quick shower and changed into a fresh uniform, by the time I was ready Smythe’s team had landed and they were getting out of their armored suits and stowing their gear. Chotek and Chang were chatting with Smythe; he was giving them a quick overview of the engagement. “Those drones,” Smythe gestured to the open back ramp of a dropship, “are a tremendous advantage to us. The Thuranin didn’t appear to have any drones of their own, or be able to counter ours, other than random rifle fire.”
“You weren’t able to leave a drone there to monitor the Thuranin?” I asked. Chang and Chotek had been able to partly follow the ground action through the relayed data link, while I had almost no idea what Smythe’s team had done, since I had been stuck at the bottom of a lake.
“Yes, Sir, we left one drone orbiting the area on autopilot, but we don’t have access to its data until we send a dropship there.” Smythe shook his head. “The bandwidth of the datalink between here and the lake only allows voice communication or brief data bursts. We can’t control the drone from here, or receive images.”
“Some of our people were in suits,” Chotek observed, “but you,” he looked at me, “and the other pilots in your Dragon were exposed. The Thuranin saw you, they know we are human.”
“Yes, Sir, but these Thuranin have been here a long time; before the wormhole shift that made Earth accessible. They don’t know who humans are. All they know is we are unfamiliar aliens.”
“Unfamiliar to them,” Chotek pressed his point. “They saw us. The Guardians are dormant for the moment. If those Thuranin are able to get a signal beyond this star system, that could be disastrous for humanity.”
“I don’t think that will happen,” Skippy entered the conversation. “There are active stealth and fuzz fields around this planet, I don’t see any reason to think the stealth field surrounding the entire star system has been deactivated. All I did was request the Guardians to stand down.”
“You don’t know for a fact the stealth field is still active,” Chotek insisted. “You can’t know, unless we go outside the system, and we can’t do that. Colonel Bishop, how can we be sure those Thuranin will not expose our secret?”
“Uh, well,” I started to say, then I smiled.
Adams knew what I was thinking. “Oh, come on, Sir, you have to say it.”
“It’s not really approp-”
“If you don’t say it, I will,” she stood facing me hands on her hips. “You know you’ve been waiting for this opportunity.”
She was right, no way could I resist. “I say we nuke the site from orbit.” I cocked my head toward Chotek. “It’s the only way to be sure.”
“Nuke?” Chotek sputtered. “You propose to use nuclear weapons on Gingerbread?” He was drowned out by laughter from everyone else around us.
The Chinese had seen Aliens. The Indians and French had all seen it. Hans Chotek may be the only member of the Merry Band of Pirates who had not seen that movie.
Seriously, what the hell was wrong with that guy?
When the laughter died down, Chotek was fuming. “Colonel Bishop, regardless of Skippy, the Guardians are not likely to stand by while we detonate nuclear-”
Oh shit. There is nothing worse than a guy who didn’t get the joke. “Sir, that was a joke. It’s, uh, a line from a movie,” I was not going to take the time right then to explain it to him. “It’s a soldiers against aliens movie, I thought,” as I spoke, it sounded lame. “Sorry, that was a bad time for a joke. Skippy, can a signal get out through the fuzz and stealth fields around this planet?”
“No way, Jose,” he declared. Then, because he probably had caught on that Chotek was in no mood for humor, he added “No, Colonel Joe. That is something I can be certain of. Unless the Thuranin have a dropship stashed away somewhere, they’ll never get a signal beyond the atmosphere.”
“Good,” I thought that issue was settled.
Then Skippy opened his big fat mouth. “Of course, they must have had a dropship to get here, right? No way could they have brought weapons and combots in escape pods. Hey,” he added happily, “now that I’m thinking about it, we are flying dropships around willy nilly, the Guardians aren’t stopping anyone from flying. It’s unlikely the Thuranin have managed to keep a dropship flightworthy over so many years, but, hmm, they wouldn’t need a dropship. Really, they could just build a crude rocket, to get a signal outside this planet’s stealth field.”
I wanted to choke him. I seriously wanted to wrap my hands around his can and squeeze, even though I knew that wouldn’t do anything to that little shithead. Waving my hands to stifle the alarmed murmuring going on around me, I spoke quickly to prevent Chotek from doing something stupid. “Sir, if we can find a conduit to fix Skippy, then we have a chance to get off Gingerbread, and whatever those Thuranin here saw won’t matter. They’ll be stuck here without any way to communicate with the outside universe. For now, I think we monitor those Thuranin, see if we can find other communities of survivors down here. Possibly survivors from the Rindhalu coalition?” I suggested. “They might be useful to us, rather than hostile.” That last remark I added because I knew the thought of finding allies would please Chotek, even if those allies had been trapped on Gingerbread for hundreds or thousands of years and would be entirely useless to help Earth now.
“Other survivors?” Chotek’s eyes lit up.
“Yes, Sir. Skippy, those Thuranin, have you figured out when they got here?”
“No, dumdum, I don’t have enough data yet. My guess is they are from the last recorded expedition to the Roach Motel, 417 years
ago.”
“More than four hundred years?” I couldn’t contain my shock. “How could they have survived all that time?”
“They couldn’t. Not all of them, anyway. The Thuranin have a sort of hibernation ability that can help stretch out their lifespan. And it is possible they have not been on Gingerbread for the past 417 years. Assuming their ship was destroyed, they might have spent centuries drifting through space in deep sleep, before landing here. Without more data, any speculation is useless,” he reminded me in an annoyed tone. “Wait for me to collect data.”
“Data, right. Sir,” I looked at Chotek, who had a faraway look. No doubt he was imagining himself meeting survivors from many civilizations on Gingerbread, negotiating with them and bringing a comprehensive peace treaty back to Earth. I imagined myself sprouting wings and flying around like an angel. My wish was more likely to happen. “We do need more data, we need to continue the survey missions.” When Chotek lifted an eyebrow skeptically, I added “The survey flights will all be conducted by two aircraft, in stealth. We will be looking for evidence of conduits, and of survivors. With the surface shrouded in a fuzz field, survey flights are the only way to know what is out there.”
That got a nod from my boss. “Very well, Colonel Bishop. I want a ground combat team with each survey flight, in case of difficulties.”
“Yes, Sir,” I assured him. “We will have one aircraft low running scans and one flying high cover.” That was going to cut in half the number of survey flights we could conduct, and seriously eat into our dwindling fuel supply, but I agreed we could no longer send out single ships.
We needed to find a working conduit, soon.
Skippy called me when I was clearing brush to create a dropship landing zone closer to base camp. “Hey Joe, when we first started flying recon missions, you asked me about the meteor impact craters on Gingerbread.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry about that, Skippy. I knew you are busy, shouldn’t have bothered you with trivia.”
“No! You got that wrong, Joe, you should have bugged me about it. If you had, I might have noticed something important earlier. Ah, actually, if you had bugged me about it, I would have been extra stubborn and refused to do anything. Anyway, I did look into the data and I found something interesting. There are a lot of impact craters, Joe, and some of them are relatively recent.”
“Lots of meteors in this star system, huh?”
“No, the opposite. That’s what caused me to look deeper into the data. This system has a thin asteroid belt, suspiciously thin. I expect the Elders mined most of the asteroids for raw materials, so an asteroid field could not be the source of an unusually large number of meteors. Next, I turned my attention to the Oort cloud, using data from the Dutchman’s sensors. There wasn’t a lot of data to work with, but I could see clearly the cloud is thin and stable; there aren’t a lot of comets swinging around the inner system here.”
“Uh, Ok?” I had no idea where he was going with the conversation.
“Really, it makes sense that there isn’t a lot of dangerous space junk floating around this system. Except for broken starships, I mean. Gingerbread was an Elder colony, they would have cleaned up any dangerous space rocks and either sent them into the star, or ejected them from the system. Or used the raw materials for construction.”
“They cleaned up the space rocks, so, where did all the meteor impacts come from?”
“Those craters were not caused by meteor impacts, Joe. Remember the craters I found on Barsoom?”
“Oh shit. Again?”
“Worse. What happened here was more destructive, and that isn’t the worst thing I found. Barsoom is essentially a dead world, so the craters there have rested almost untouched since they were created. Gingerbread is a living planet, with rain and weather and erosion and plants sinking roots into the soil, and that confused me for a while. Now that I’m focusing on the data, I can see the smaller craters were made by relativistic impactors.”
“Tiny rocks moving half the speed of light?” I guessed.
“Something like that, although certainly not crude rocks, and maybe not moving quite that fast. The larger craters, the ones I suspect scooped out entire cities or other substantial facilities, were created by transitioning a sphere-shaped area out of phase into another spacetime. That’s kind of overkill in my opinion.”
“I thought you said ‘overkill is underrated’?”
“That’s true when I’m doing it, Joe. If the Elders wanted to ensure the tech in their cities did not get touched by grubby aliens, there are more sophisticated, less energy-intensive ways of doing it.”
“Maybe someone was showing off?”
“Ah, maybe. What worries me is another possibility: an energy-intensive method was used because someone wanted the cities removed quickly. Or, worse, removed in a hostile manner.”
“Crap. Oh, man,” I gasped at the implication. “That’s not good. You think those big craters weren’t the Elders picking up stuff before they left, you think those cities were destroyed in an attack?”
“I do. My analysis shows the large craters are roughly the same age as the craters on Barsoom; about one hundred million years.”
“Whoa.” What was humanity doing a hundred million years ago? Oh that’s right, nothing. That was, um, wait, I know this one because dinosaurs are cool. A hundred million years ago was during the Cretaceous Period that ended with the extinction of the dinosaurs. My memory is vague, but I think the Cretaceous was when birds and flowering plants first evolved and- Ok, I kind of got off the subject there. “Some bad shit happened on Gingerbread back then.”
“Not just back then, Joe. That’s the worst part. The big craters are all old, and of the same age. Some of the smaller impact craters date back to that same time, but I found a couple as recent as six thousand years ago. It looks like something, or someone, has been regularly bombarding the surface of Gingerbread over the last few million years.”
“Regularly? On Earth, we have meteor showers the same time every year, when our orbit passes through-”
“Yes, yes,” he dismissed my comment irritably. “I should not have said ‘regularly’, I should have said ‘periodically’. There was a big cluster of impacts about a hundred million years ago, then nothing until about the same time Newark was thrown out of orbit. After that there is another gap, then starting about a million years ago, I see impacts scattered randomly across the timeline.”
“Artificial impacts? Someone cleaning up Elder sites they missed the first time, by blowing them up from orbit?”
“I do not think that is likely, Joe. The first set of impacts, a hundred million years ago, could have been for the purpose of destroying leftover Elder sites. But the cluster of impacts around the time disaster struck Newark must be something different. And then there are smaller impacts widely scattered in time. For example, there is a cluster of craters seven hundred kilometers to the south of here, that I have dated approximately two hundred thousand years ago.” He showed me a graphic with the timeline of impacts. There was no pattern to them. “At this point,” he continued, “I do not have any clue what the data is telling me. I do have a nagging feeling this is important, that I am not simply digging into useless ancient history trivia. I will continue to analyze the data, and see if I can puzzle out what it means.”
Right then, all I cared about was that someone wasn’t going to drop a relativistic impactor on my own head, but I didn’t say that to Skippy.
Later, I realized I should have told him. Damn, the one time I keep my big mouth shut is the time I should have spoken up.
“Joe Joe Joe Joe!” Skippy’s voice startled me awake. The sound was coming from the zPhone earpiece under my pillow, or the rolled-up sweater I was using as a pillow on my cot.
“What?” I held the earpiece to my ear and glanced at my zPhone. Damn it! He woke me up at 0413. Gingerbread’s day was twenty six and a half Earth hours, so I was hoping for an extra hour of sleep before I was scheduled to fly as c
opilot on a recon mission. “This couldn’t have waited?” I whispered to avoid disturbing people around me in the shelter. No such luck; the people were all combat veterans and they became instantly awake when they heard the distressed tone of my voice. I waved that everything was all right, and heads dropped back down. Along with waking quickly, elite soldiers had developed the ability to fall back asleep just as quickly.
“It could have waited, sure, but your bladder was going to wake you up in like ten minutes anyway. You shouldn’t have drunk a whole canteen full of water before going to sleep.”
Damn it, now that I was sitting up, I knew he was right. “Give me a minute.”
After visiting the latrine, I wandered away from base camp after texting the two guards on duty what I was doing. There was a flat rock overlooking a stream, I sat on the rock and listened to the water splashing along. With a bare zephyr of an early morning breeze rustling the leaves unseen in the darkness above me, I could easily imagine myself on Earth. It even smelled the same; damp soil, the fresh scent of moving water, and something very much like pine needles. “Ok, I’m reasonably awake. What is it?”
“You sure you don’t want to grab a cup of coffee first? Captain Giraud made a fresh pot less than an hour ago.”
“No coffee.” I was hoping to crawl back in my cot soon.
“Joe, you get cranky when-”
“You want to see what cranky looks like?”
“Uh, no. Okaaaay, I can tell somebody needs more sleep. Anywho, I found something interesting in the survey flight sensor data. Two interesting things, actually.”
“Interesting like, dangerous? Because if not, I’m going to get some more rack time.” Crap, I was supposed to run with the Chinese team at 0630.
“I think I found a conduit.”
Hearing that made me sit up straight. “Where?”
“Before we get into that, let me tell you what else I found. I think I know why there are impact craters almost randomly over the past million years. There isn’t any pattern to them, but then I realized the dates match up with dates in another data set.”
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 36
