by Rick Partlow
“Then stop the car,” Sigurdsen told him, breathing a sigh of obvious relief. “We’re here.”
“We’re getting out,” Lambert radioed to the crew of the scout car. Watch our backs.”
Hefting his rifle, the Gunnery Sergeant hit the hatch control and stepped out, followed closely by Shannon, Governor Sigurdsen and Captain Trang. The rest of the Marines as well as the Intelligence team members fanned out around the vehicle, half to establish a perimeter and half because of an age-old conviction among footsoldiers that a halted vehicle was nothing but a nice, fat target.
The path had terminated in a bare rock face, sloping sharply upward for at least a hundred meters before it levelled off. Looking at it in the blue stealthlights of the APC, Shannon could find no seam in the cliff face, but Sigurdsen strode directly over to the center of it and slapped his bare palm against the stone, then quickly stepped back. With a hermetic hiss and a hum of servos, a ten-meter wide section of the rock wall separated inward and began to slide slowly aside.
“My God.” Shannon shook her head as a subdued, red-tinted light flickered on inside the shelter’s entry chamber. “This must have taken months.”
“And a ton of money,” Sigurdsen confirmed. “Unfortunately, it was worth it.”
“Bring the baby home, Bobby,” Lambert transmitted. “Clear the way, you damned jarheads.”
The dismounted passengers stepped aside to allow the APC and the scout car inside, then moved carefully in behind them as Sigurdsen found the inner door control.
“Stay where you are till the lights come on,” the governor warned, palming the ID plate.
It seemed to Shannon, standing in the dimly-lit, uncertain space of the chamber that it took hours for the false rock face to slide back into place, but it finally sealed into the side of the mountain, triggering the circuit for the overhead lighting.
The place was, if anything, bigger than it appeared from the outside. The entry chamber was as large as an industrial garage—which, indeed, it was. Beside the newly-arrived military vehicles, the garage chamber was already occupied by a heavy-duty, all-terrain utility rover; a light, skeleton-framed dune buggy; and a pair of battery-powered dirt bikes. Spare parts, maintenance equipment, charging stands and fuel tanks took up what little spare room there was along the side walls.
Shannon heard quite a few relieved groans and sighs as the crews of both vehicles dismounted and stretched out the kinks of several hours “in the saddle.” Then, quite suddenly, she realized that everyone in the garage was looking at her, waiting for a decision.
Oh well, she chuckled inwardly, you’re the one who wanted a command.
“Sergeant Lambert,” she said, “you and your men should get some rest, but before you stand down, I’d like you and Sergeant Mahoney to do a security check of this installation—Captain Trang can help you as well. I’d also like a full inventory of all weapons and ammunition within the hour.”
“Right away, ma’am,” Lambert acknowledged.
“Tom, Jock,” Shannon went on, turning to the men, “you’re to help with the inventory. Governor Sigurdsen, I’d like to see your communications setup.”
“First things first, Lieutenant,” Nathan Tanaka interrupted. “You are wounded. Governor,” he addressed the big man, “do you have any medical supplies?”
“Right this way,” Sigurdsen said.
“It’s nothing,” Shannon protested as she was led through the passage out of the garage into a central control area.
“Now, it’s nothing,” Tanaka insisted. “Tomorrow, it will be infected. You are the commander now; you cannot afford weakness.”
She gave up and let the bodyguard lead her to a couch in one corner of the large chamber, gently pulling off the armored vest she’d been loaned. Governor Sigurdsen pulled a briefcase-sized medical kit from one of the supply cabinets that lined the wall and set it on the table in front of the couch, popping its latches.
Tanaka sorted through the various packages in the case’s compartment and came up with a spray can of local anesthetic. Coating Shannon’s shoulder with a generous dose of the liquid, the bodyguard secured a large pair of forceps and a sterile swab and latched onto the largest of the jagged splinters.
“Ready?” he asked with a look of genuine concern that surprised her.
She nodded, turning her head away, and he carefully pulled the barb out of her shoulder, tossing it aside and mopping up the flow of blood with the swab. The other splinters came out easier, and soon he was spreading disinfectant over the area in preparation for bandaging it.
“You should have been a doctor,” she told him seriously.
“I should have been many things,” he replied softly, half to himself, as he taped the bandage in place. “But we do not always hold our fate in our own hands. There,” he fastened the last strip of cloth. “Try not to move this arm for the next day or so.”
“Happy birthday,” Sergeant Lambert deadpanned, stepping up to them and tossing Shannon a Marine-issue T-shirt. “A donation from your adoring fans.”
“Thanks,” she said, gingerly slipping into the garment.
Vinnie, Jock and Captain Trang had entered the room behind Lambert, and the three of them formed a semicircle around the couch, while Lambert flopped down on the couch beside Stark and Tanaka, casually propping his feet up on the table.
“Well, we’re sitting pretty here, Lieutenant,” he informed her. “There’s two main entrances, two emergency exits, three different sources of ventilation, about three meters of rock on all sides and complete 360 degree fiber-optic observation. If those ugly bastards ever found this place, they’d have a hell of a time prying us out of here. I’m not even sure this thing couldn’t survive a nuclear strike.”
“My contractors assured me it would,” Sigurdsen commented with something of a sense of proprietary pride.
“What about food and water?” Shannon asked the governor. “And power?”
“There’s enough food to last a year,” the big man informed her. “As for water and power, we’re sitting on top of an underground river: it’s what dug out most of these tunnels. I had a pair of hydroelectric generators put in; we’ll have power until they wear out… maybe two or three hundred years.”
“I wasn’t planning on hanging around quite that long,” she muttered. “All right, Jock, tell me about the weapons.”
“Ten M-70 Marine Individual Weapons,” the Australian reported, reading off from a display on his pocket computer, “with about 3,000 rounds of rifle ammo and fifty rifle-launched grenades. Two SR-8 autoguns with 2,000 rounds apiece. Four submachine guns with around a hundred rounds each. Three shoulder-launchers with ten reloads. Me’n Vinnie still have our grenade launchers, but we’re down to about two mags for each gun, and that rifle you picked up has five mags left, forty rounds in each. As for the vehicles, the chain guns are a bit low—about three hundred shots per. Grenade cannons are topped off, and they’ve still got ten missiles for the scout car’s launcher.” He shrugged, looking back up at her from the compact machine. “Plus three or four handguns with twenty rounds each and various knives, and that’s about it.”
“Plenty if we lay low and wait for a quick bailout,” Lambert pointed out. “Not even close if we try to hit them.” He spat a stream of tobacco juice into a corner wastebasket, earning a dirty look from the governor. “But then, I didn’t sign up to sit on my ass.”
“We should try to contact the Mac,” Jock declared. “If they’re still around, they could pull us out of here.”
Tanaka shook his head. “I do not think that would be wise. Transmitting from here would bring the enemy down upon us. They might not be able to penetrate this place, but we would lose it as a possible base of operations.”
“The Mac’s gone,” Vinnie declared, sitting on an arm of the couch. “If they were still in control, they’d have sent the fighter to support us at the mansion. They’re either on the run, or…” He left the sentence hanging, unwilling to verbally exec
ute two hundred men and women.
“We tried to call for air support on the way to the mansion,” Lambert told Shannon. “Nothin’ but dead air.” He shrugged. “Course they might have been jammin’ us.” He was trying to sound hopeful, but not succeeding. Shannon shared his pessimism: despite the best efforts of Republic researchers, the only way to send a message faster than light was to write it down and stick it in a starship. If the Mac was gone, they were a long way from the nearest help.
“Is it possible,” Captain Trang asked, speaking for the first time in the impromptu meeting, “to set up some kind of mobile transmitter? Perhaps we could take the radio from one of the vehicles and set up a temporary position far enough away from here to be safe. Then, after the mobile unit transmits and moves on, we could listen for a response here, at our leisure.”
“That’s not a bad idea.” Shannon said thoughtfully. “Sergeant Lambert, have some of your people dismount the radio from the APC. We’ll work out the rest of the details later.”
“What about after that?” Vinnie wanted to know. “Are we going to lay low, or try to do something?” Silence greeted his question, as Shannon considered the matter.
“It might be prudent,” Tanaka suggested quietly, “to send out a scout.”
“Yeah,” Shannon agreed, grateful to have that decision put off. “We’ll send out a recon team. Two men, on those dirt bikes. They’ll take the transmitter with them and head into the desert. After they make the transmission, they can head for Kennedy and look things over.”
“Who’s going?” Jock wanted to know.
“I was a qualified commo geek in the Corps,” Vinnie threw out.
“It’s yours, Vinnie,” Stark told him. “And we’re going to need someone who’s familiar with the territory.”
“I will go,” Captain Trang volunteered. “I have flown over every inch of this planet at one time or another.”
“You sure you want to take the risk, Captain?” Shannon asked him. “It’s our job, after all.”
“Call it a hobby.” The mercenary captain smiled humorlessly.
“All right then,” Stark concluded. “We have a plan. You two leave tomorrow night. Try to get some sleep, and get something to eat. We’ll outfit you in the morning.”
The group broke up, scattering to find places to sleep. As they walked away, side by side, Shannon saw Jock nudge Vinnie, shaking his head.
“Damn it, it’s just not fair, mate,” he said with a laugh. “You have all the fun.”
Chapter Eight
“Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit.”
—Bern Williams
Jason McKay woke up shivering furiously, huddling under the suddenly inadequate blanket against the bone-chilling cold of the rock floor beneath him, trying to squeeze his eyes shut to keep out the intrusive sunlight that threatened to pry them open.
Hold on a second, something in his dormant consciousness protested. Sunlight?
His eyes popped open and he bolted upright, immediately aware of the jarring facts: it was the morning after the alien attack; he was sitting in the small mountain cave that they had taken shelter in late the night before; he was Goddamn freezing; and he was alone.
“Shit,” he hissed, snatching his pistol from the ground beside him and coming to his feet.
Where the hell was Valerie O’Keefe?
Cautiously, yet with a mounting sense of urgency, Jason ducked out of the low, rounded cave mouth and emerged into the still-gentle light of the morning sunrise. Greenish-brown scrub surrounded the cave entrance, thickening into a nearly-impassable tangle of thorns and roots on either side of the narrow game trail that led down the steep slope to the clearing where he’d parked the rover.
McKay scanned carefully around him, but the rover wasn’t visible from his position and he could hear nothing but the moan of the wind through the mountain pass. They were still in the foothills of what the discoverers of this world had named the Edge Mountains, but the jagged peaks all around seemed sharper and more rugged than any he’d seen on Earth. The harsh, white light of Tau Ceti threw the dark crags into sharp relief against the yellow sky, raising the hackles on McKay’s neck as his hind-brain rebelled against the notion that he was actually on another world, eleven light-years from Earth. There was just something inherently wrong about that notion that at once frightened and excited him.
“Fucked up and far from home,” McKay muttered.
Shaking his head clear of such esoteric rumblings, Jason carefully negotiated the path down the hill, kicking loose dirt and rocks as he half-walked, half-slid along the barely-existent trail.
How the hell, he wondered, had they ever made it up this at night?
He managed to reach the bottom of the hill on his feet after about ten meters of a half-controlled slide, then took a moment to regain his balance and listen again for any sign of trouble. Farther down the draw and away from the howl of the wind, he began to hear some kind of activity down in the clearing—nothing frantic or violent, just a faint creak of metal and the sound of shuffling feet.
Probably just Valerie getting a drink of water, he told himself—but no use taking chances. He hugged the edge of the path as he slowly made his way around to the perimeter of the clearing, the rear end of the parked rover finally coming into view. Last night, he had made an attempt to camouflage the vehicle with brush, hoping to avoid being spotted from the air or from orbit, but the brush had been pulled away from the rear of the rover and the tailgate was down.
Resting on the lowered rear hatch were one of the water jugs and the bulk of Valerie O’Keefe’s clothes. A wide grin forced its way across Jason’s face as he advanced further and saw Valerie standing to the side of the tailgate, naked, giving herself a sponge bath.
The right thing to do, he knew, would be to turn away and go back to the cave till she was finished. The decent thing would have been to at least back around the corner and announce his presence. Instead, he halted just out of sight and treated his eyes to a nice, long look.
She was, he allowed honestly, very nice to look at. She obviously kept herself in good shape, and either nature or a surgical bodysculpt—he suspected the former—had been kind to her as well. Letting his gaze travel up the soft curve of her hip to her full, rounded breasts, Jason was a bit surprised by the natural response that was pressing against the inside of his fatigue trousers.
He hadn’t been this instantly aroused by the sight of a naked woman since high school, and he actually had to concentrate to keep himself from having a potentially embarrassing accident.
Well, McKay, he thought to himself, there’s only two ways to go here: forward or backward. A wise man, a prudent man, would retreat and keep things less complicated. A balls-to-the-wall, aggressive Marine type would seize the moment and throw caution to the wind. You’re not one of those Marine type of guys anymore, are you?
“Morning!” he said with cheerful loudness, stepping out into the clearing.
“McKay, you bastard!” Valerie shrieked, dropping the wet rag she’d been washing with and snatching her shirt off the tailgate to hold against her chest in a vain attempt at modesty. “Damn it, turn around!”
“I don’t want to turn around,” he told her honestly, slipping his pistol back into its shoulder holster as he advanced slowly toward her. “I like this view.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be an officer and a gentleman?” she demanded, arching an eyebrow, but noticeably less upset than she had been a moment before.
“Is that what you want me to be?” he asked her, stopping only centimeters from her, feeling the heat of her body and seeing the flush of her cheeks and shoulders. “A gentleman?”
“No,” she whispered hoarsely, shaking her head.
Without another word, he pulled her into a passionate kiss, her shirt falling to the ground. Her body was still wet from the sponge bath, and he could feel the dampness soaking through his shirt, hot from the burning flush of her skin.
He broke the kiss long enough to rip off his overshirt and shoulder holster, then pulled off his T-shirt and tossed the garments onto the rover’s tailgate. He moved forward and grasped her by the shoulders, lifted her into his arms, and set her down on the tailgate, a half-shy, half-seductive smile on her face that was about to drive him out of his mind.
He was far too aroused to be gentle or patient and she didn’t seem to mind; she worked his belt loose and yanked his trousers down over his hips with a frantic need that matched his own. They came together with an urgency that went beyond the physical and spent itself quickly with a flare of emotion that consumed them both.Jason felt the air go out of him and he nearly collapsed on top of Val, her arms clasped around his shoulders as his head rested on her breast.
“Jesus,” he breathed.
“Oh, Jason,” she hissed. “I’ve been wanting to do that for days.”
“I’ve got a great idea.” His head popped up, a wild glint in his eye. “Let’s do it again.”
“Race you to the cave,” she laughed, grabbing her clothes and taking off up the path.
“Hey, wait up!” he protested, trying to collect his scattered garments and his pistol.
“If you aren’t there in thirty seconds,” he could hear her voice come from farther up the hill, “I’ll start without you!”
“I’m on my way!” he promised, arms filled with clothes as he gingerly made his way across the rocks on bare feet.
This, he thought ludicrously to himself, would be a heck of a time for someone to take a shot at us.
“Oh, well,” he muttered with a philosophical shrug. “There are no ex-Marines.”
* * *
Much later, Jason watched Valerie as she lay unmoving in the crook of his shoulder, drifting in the exhaustion and afterglow of their frenzied—almost desperate—lovemaking. Her face was perfect in sleep, peaceful and child-like, with a natural beauty that stirred anew the urges that had propelled him into her arms hours before. He was tempted to wake her and see if he could manage to perform just once more, but she probably needed the rest—emotionally, if not physically.
