by Rick Partlow
“That’s kind of weak, Oz.” Glen shook his head. “Maybe he’s just come to appreciate stability now that he has some real responsibility.”
“So stable he won’t commit to his girlfriend? Responsible? Hell, Mulrooney, he took time off from a summit with the South American Workers’ Unity Party and the Southern States’ Government Conference to go rock climbing! He’s not stable or responsible…he’s fucking frozen. It’s just like someone told him…act just like Xavier Dominguez acted the last time he was seen on Earth before his trip to Aphrodite.”
“So, what are you saying, Oz? That it’s not really Dominguez? That someone has taken his place? Do you know how impossible that would be? I can’t even tell you how much identity verification there is for the Vice President of the Republic, but we’re talking DNA, alpha wave, full biometrics…it’s just impossible.”
“I don’t know what I’m saying, Mulrooney,” Ozzie shrugged. “But you told me to run him through the program, and I ran him. This is what I got. You do with it what you will. But I will tell you something, my friend, this sort of search is not something that can go completely unnoticed. You have to know what to look for, and you have to be actively looking for it, but if they do…they’re going to find out who ran it.” Ozzie stood up, shrugging his shoulders. “You might think this is nothing, that I’m being paranoid, but I’m going on vacation for a while. Don’t try to find me.”
With that, the older man turned and walked briskly out of the locker room. Glen watched him go with a bemused smile on his face.
Ozzie is nuts, he thought, shaking his head. He’s gotta’ be.
And yet...
He took his ‘link out of his swim bag and pulled up the address Shannon Stark had given to him back in the cabin. Maybe it was nuts, but she’d want to know anyway. “Major Stark,” he spoke into the ‘link, “looked into that matter. There is some evidence that…”
Glen never saw the arm that snaked around his neck, never saw the ceramic blade that speared through his left eye and into his brain. Blackness claimed him before he could form a final thought.
Chapter Nine
Walking through forests darkened by the shadows of thirty meter tall trees, Jason McKay decided that the videos he’d watched didn’t do Peboan justice. The place was so much larger and more intimidating in person. There was a chill bite to the air, an ozone tang to its smell, that the recordings hadn’t captured; and a paranoid foreboding to the trackless forests that no video could convey. Added to the slight difference in gravity from Earth and the odd color cast the blue-tinted primary star gave to everything just to remind you that you were on an alien world light years from home, it was enough to raise hackles on the back of his neck.
“I don’t think I like this place,” D’mitry Podbyrin commented quietly, eyes darting around from shadow to shadow, hands clenching like they longed for a weapon. Behind them nearly a kilometer back were the ruins of the scout base, being pored over by the technicians for any as-yet-undiscovered evidence, but McKay had wanted to get an idea of how the infiltrators had approached the place, so he had headed into the surrounding forest with Jock, Vinnie, and the Russian expatriate looking for their landing site.
“It is a bit creepy,” Jock said with a shrug, “but all in all, I like it better than laying around up there in the ship.”
“At least there is gravity here,” Podbyrin grunted agreement. McKay had been surprised when the man had volunteered to go down with the landing party; apparently, zero gravity didn’t agree with his stomach after so many years living planetside. “Are we sure they came from this direction?” Podbyrin wondered, looking around them at the looming trees, each thick as a sequoia, their bark an inky black. He looked out of place in borrowed Marine body armor and fatigues.
“Well, on the west, the front of the outpost is pretty open,” McKay explained. “I doubt they would have advertised they were coming by setting down at the landing zone the scouts cleared. East has a sheer cliff about a hundred meters out overlooking a pretty steep canyon. South there are lava-rock hills…it’s a possibility, but an accurate landing on those hillsides would have been iffy. So I’m betting they came from the north. There has to be a clearing somewhere out this way they could use to land, then walk in.”
“Fuckin’ chilly out here,” Vinnie muttered, flexing his gloved fingers for a moment before they returned to gripping his carbine. “And this is what? Summer?”
“Close enough,” McKay confirmed. “Late Spring, almost Summer. It doesn’t get much warmer than this in these parts from what I’ve heard.”
“Feels like home,” Podbyrin said with a shrug. McKay idly wondered if he meant his home on Loki or his home back in Twenty-First Century Russia.
“I don’t think they would have risked dropping too far from the outpost,” McKay mused, coming back to the subject. “The biomechs don’t have that much in the way of autonomy, and they’d have to guide them through the woods probably in the dark…”
“Yes,” Podbyrin said, nodding agreement. “Three, four kilometers, no more. But your people who found the base destroyed….would not they have found any landing site already?”
“They didn’t have time,” McKay informed him. “It was late Fall when they arrived. They had just found the rifle casings when the first big storms of the winter rolled in and dumped about a meter of snow on this place. The ship’s captain made the call to get the news back to Earth instead of waiting out the weather.”
Stepping across the bare floor, desolate and shielded from the star’s warmth by the tyranny of the trees, they fell silent under the oppressive hush of the forest, eyes hunting for signs of intrusion but seeing only a still-frame sameness. Long, wordless minutes passed, the only sound the faint crunching of dead leaves beneath their boots, and McKay began to lose track of time and distance. A quick check of his ‘link revealed that they had walked nearly three klicks from the outpost and he had begun to debate whether he was going to go any farther on foot.
“Hold up,” Vinnie said softly, raising a fist in the air to halt them. Slowly he brought up his carbine, gesturing with the barrel to a point on their right. “Three o’clock, fifty meters, on the ground.”
McKay scanned to their front right and almost passed over the dark shape as a root or rock before he came back to it, noticing the not-quite-right color, the too-regular shape.
“Vinnie, Jock, stay here and keep overwatch,” McKay ordered. “Podbyrin, you’re with me.”
“Joy,” the Russian muttered, following behind him.
As the two men approached the object, its lines grew clearer and its color more distinct…it was globular, colored a dull grey mixed with rust. McKay nudged it with the barrel of his carbine, turning it over and revealing it for the broken remnants of a battle helmet.
“That is Protectorate,” Podbyrin declared, a slight waver in his voice.
“You’re damned right it is,” McKay muttered. The visor was gone, shattered, the pieces buried and carried away in the snow melt, but the helmet’s design was all too familiar to McKay. He waved Jock and Vinnie forward, standing and turning to keep watch as they examined the helmet.
Jock cursed softly. “Well, no more doubt now,” he muttered.
“Come on,” McKay said. “We still have to find where they landed.”
As they moved on through the forest another few hundred meters, McKay began to notice a gentle upward slope to the ground and a thinning of the trees, accompanied by a lightening of the gloom and the presence on the forest floor of some short, stunted growths of some sort of plant life that wasn’t quite grass but could have passed for it on first glance. Gradually the slope increased and he could see that they were heading for the crest of a small hill. He halted the others with an upraised hand, taking a knee on the soft loam.
“Jock,” he instructed. “Scout the other side of that hill.”
The big man nodded and slowly made his way toward the hilltop, going from a crouch to a high crawl, knees
and elbows taking him forward to the very edge, where he dropped to his belly and wormed the last few meters. Jock was, McKay reflected, surprisingly stealthy for someone almost two meters tall and a good 110 kilos. After a long moment, he turned back to them and waved them forward. McKay led Podbyrin up the hill while Vinnie watched their backs, trailing them by ten meters and scanning carefully around.
“Eleven o’clock, one hundred meters,” Jock said quietly as they went to the ground beside him.
McKay looked down into the valley on the other side of the hill, seeing a narrow, shallow stream cutting through it and meandering into the near distance as it wound around another hill. The trees had thinned out near the hilltop and there was a clearing near the middle of the valley, not far from the creek. In that clearing was what appeared at first glance to be a mound of loose dirt…until a closer look revealed its true character. Here and there, the dirt deposited by mudslides after the spring melt had fallen away, revealing the bare nickel-iron and small pieces of the grey, gnarled surface of polystyrene: a cheap, low-tech method of making the thing invisible to microwave sensors. A single surviving parachute shroud whipped in the wind like a tail behind the thing, the huge parasail it had once secured long ripped and blown away by winter storms.
It was a Protectorate drop pod, the same sort of cheap, stealthy insertion craft that Antonov had used to invade Earth five years before.
McKay felt his throat go dry. It was one thing to know something on a purely intellectual level; it was another to come face to face with the reality of it. He swallowed hard, forced himself to concentrate on scanning the area around the pod for threats.
“Looks clear,” he rasped. “Jock, stay up here and cover us.”
The footing on the downward slope was treacherous from fallen leaves slick with yesterday’s rain and the three men wound up half-sliding down it, McKay and Vinnie in a half-crouch, Podbyrin squarely on his ass. As McKay reached the valley floor he brought up his carbine and nearly squeezed off a shot at a blur of movement to his left, but held off as he saw that the tan flash was an animal of some kind…an herbivore by the look of it, the size of a cow, four-legged and covered with shaggy fur. He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding as the thing galloped silently out of the valley.
“Coulda’ been dinner,” Vinnie cracked quietly, shrugging. McKay snorted, grateful for Vinnie’s irreverence.
“I like my steak a little less rare,” he muttered in return.
There were no humanoid tracks around the pod, McKay saw as they approached it, no trace of the Protectorate biomech troops at all. Everything had been wiped clean by the snow melt and the rains and the only tracks were from the local wildlife. He circled the lander slowly and carefully, not fearing a present threat as much as the possibility of missing something.
Going around the other side, they could see where the explosive bolts had split the pod in half to free its payload of troops, the edges jagged and broken. The floor of the pod’s interior was buried in several inches of mud, dirt and animal droppings…something had evidently used it as a den during the winter. McKay saw piles of small bones collected under the metal benches that had held rows of seated biomechs but were now bare except for more caked dirt.
McKay sighed, shoulders sagging. “We’re not going to get anything useful out of here. Time to let the lab techs have their fun.” He tapped a control on his ‘link. “McKay to Decatur, over.”
“Decatur here,” came the reply from the ship’s communications officer. “Over.”
“Get a fix on my location,” McKay instructed, “and get me a full field investigation team down here ASAP. We’ve found the Protectorate drop pod.”
“Aye, sir.” McKay could hear a slight waver in the woman’s voice as the reality of the situation hit her. “Captain Minishimi says it will launch in a couple hours.”
“Acknowledged. McKay out.”
“This feels wrong.” McKay turned, surprised, at Podbyrin’s quiet declaration. The Russian was shaking his head thoughtfully, staring at the wreckage of the drop pod.
“What?” McKay wanted to know.
“To attack like this,” Podbyrin amplified. “This is a risk, no? It draws attention. The General has spent the last five years avoiding attention, rebuilding one assumes. To do this, there would have to be something very important here that he wanted.”
“We’re not going to find it standing here,” McKay shrugged. “Let’s head back to the outpost site. Maybe someone’s turned up something there.”
* * *
“What do we know about this planet?” McKay murmured to himself, staring at the globe map of Peboan projected above the table. He’d been leaning against the table for the last ten minutes and the map hadn’t yet revealed any secrets to him.
“It’s pretty rich in minerals,” Vinnie shrugged from where he sat on the floor of the outpost building, leaning against a bare wall. The investigation team had cleared them to use the place as a base after they’d finished scanning it a few hours ago, but there still wasn’t much in the way of furniture available. “Oil, natural gas, uranium, gold…”
“But we haven’t seen any evidence of mining from orbit,” Jock pointed out. The big man was squatting by the opposite wall, cleaning his field-stripped carbine.
“D’mitry,” McKay asked the Russian, who leaned against the wall beside where Vinnie was sitting, “did Antonov ever do any asteroid mining or did he get his resources from planetside?”
“We did not have the equipment for smelting asteroids,” Podbyrin told them. “Nor did we have extensive EVA gear for working in vacuum for long periods. We were forced to get those resources which we couldn’t steal from your cargo ships from easily-available mines near the surface of habitable planets.”
“Okay, we have no reason to believe that’s changed,” McKay said, nodding. “So, it’s possible he needed resources from this planet…but we haven’t found the location he mined yet. Is there anything else you guys can think of that would make this place important to him?”
“Location?” Jock ventured. “He uses those gates to travel FTL…maybe this system is a hub of some kind, and he needed to move something through here without us seeing?”
McKay cast a questioning glance at Podbyrin, who nodded confirmation. “That is possible,” the Russian said. “There were several systems that had multiple gates.”
“Not bad, Jock,” McKay said, nodding thoughtfully. “That feels more likely to me than just a mining site. If he has to move through here to get to where he’s going, he’d want to keep this system clear of Republic forces. It might be worth the risk to him to take out this outpost.” His eyes narrowed and he grabbed his ‘link from his belt. “Decatur, this is McKay, come in.”
A pause and then: “Roger, McKay, this is Decatur, go ahead.”
“Let me speak with the Captain,” McKay told the communications officer. “It’s urgent.”
“Aye, sir, wait one.”
“Minishimi here,” her voice came over the ‘link after a moment. “Go ahead, McKay.”
“Captain,” McKay said calmly but firmly, “we’ve been piecing some things together and I have reason to believe that Protectorate forces may still be in this system and are probably maintaining surveillance here…we may be facing an imminent threat. I recommend breaking orbit and taking up a tactical posture at the closest LaGrangian point and launching combat shuttle patrols immediately.”
Behind McKay, Vinnie and Podbyrin slowly came to their feet, concern on their faces. Jock seemed unmoved, but he silently began reassembling his carbine.
“Our active scans aren’t showing anything, McKay,” Minishimi protested over the link. “Are you certain about this?”
“Captain,” McKay took a deep breath and reminded himself she wasn’t his subordinate, “our working hypothesis is that this is a hub system for their wormhole matrix…and if that’s the case, they will not be leaving it unguarded. It’s my feeling that there are either enemy
ships already insystem or else some sort of automated sentry that launched a message buoy through the gate the minute it spotted us. If I’m right, we could have anywhere from days to no time at all, but I would recommend we err on the side of caution.”
“Roger, McKay,” Minishimi acknowledged with, he thought, a little reluctance in her voice. “We are launching patrols and then will engage the drives and move out of orbit. We’ll be out of contact once the drives activate, but I will instruct the patrols to keep contact with you. You have a shuttle on the ground right now…do you want them to stay there for possible evac?”
“If it’s all right with you, Captain, we’ll keep Commander Villanueva’s shuttle here just in case.”
“I’ll send them the word, and then we are out of orbit. If we don’t see anything in twenty four hours, we’ll drop the Eysselink field and contact you.”
“Talk to you then, Captain.” McKay tapped a new frequency into his ‘link. “Lieutenant Dodd, this is McKay.”
“Dodd here, sir,” came the reply.
“Lieutenant, what’s the disposition of the Marines currently onplanet?” McKay asked. Jock had finished reassembling his carbine and he loaded the magazine, chambering a round and moving to stand in the open door of the building.
“Sir, we have two platoons down,” the young officer reported crisply. “One is in a defensive perimeter around the shuttles at the landing zone; the other is assisting the investigation team in bringing their equipment to the Protectorate pod you discovered.”
