It would be nice to have the company, but Kris still felt like she was being railroaded into something that maybe wasn't such a good idea. “Chief, I'd sure like to know more about that alien site.”
“So would I, Kris. It's making a lot of noise on the electromagnetic spectrum, but I can't make head nor tails out of it.”
“I believe you did say it was alien,” sounded like Abby on the net.
Kris ignored the comment. “I have no intention of dropping Marines into the middle of something we know nothing about. I need to get a good look at it before I approve a drop mission.”
“We can make a couple of orbital passes,” the chief said. “Drop a few remote eyes to get a good look at it.”
“I intend to put my battle squadron in a geosynchronous orbit above the target where I can keep it in constant observation,” Admiral Krätz said.
Which would keep him well out of harm's way but in a great position to tell them what they were doing wrong. Kris also remembered recently being half a klick from a target when Krätz decided to laser it from orbit.
All the more reason to be careful with her Marines.
“I'm not putting my Marines anywhere near that site until I get a good look at it. Better yet, I want to keep getting a good look at it. Preferably with a load of ordnance I can do something with.”
“We have some ground attack craft aboard the
Fury
,” Vicky said.
“Ground attack craft?” Kris found herself once again echoing.
“Yes. Big ugly things,” the grand duchess said. “Thirtymillimeter Gatling cannon in its nose. Wings you can load with ordnance. I was told it was a standard design.”
“Nelly?” Kris said.
“The ground attack craft were built to provide close support to infantry during the Iteeche war. It was a standard design developed on Earth and built on several planets. If it has been properly maintained, this relic of the last war should still be functional,” Nelly said.
“Chief Mong,” Captain Drago said, “do we have mechanics familiar with a ground attack craft and able to check one out?”
“God, sir, did you find one of those old things?” didn't sound encouraging.
“The Greenfeld battle squadron has a couple, and the princess wants to fly one.”
“I'll put together a team immediately, sir,” he said quickly.
“Vicky, do you want to join me for a trip to the
Fury
?”
“No thank you. I'm comfortable here.”
“Jack, do you want to drop with your Marines or ride backseat with me?”
This put the Marine captain on the horns of a dilemma. As Kris's chief of security, he shouldn't let her out of his sight. As the commander of the Marine company aboard the
Wasp
, he really shouldn't let them wander off without adult supervision. At the moment, he needed to be in two places at once.
Kris had read somewhere about holy people who were supposed to be able to be in two places at the same time. Jack didn't strike Kris as anything close to holy. She waited for him to make his difficult call.
“Colonel, neither of my platoon skippers is experienced enough to lead the company,” Jack said. He didn't have to mention that experienced platoon skippers around Kris tended to pay for that experience by ending up in hospitals somewhere and missing the
Wasp
's next movement.
“This is getting to be a habit,” the colonel grumbled. “But I managed to walk away from the last drop mission. I expect I'll survive this one.”
With her chain of command now wrapped into its usual macramé, Kris headed for a launch, leaving one final plea behind her for Chief Beni to discover something. Anything! About the alien site.
38
Kris was greeted as she boarded the
Fury
by a junior officer who admitted that he was personally responsible for maintaining the GACs. He wasn't surprised that Kris had brought her own maintenance team.
He was surprised that it was led by a chief and included several petty officers.
The chief muttered something to Kris about draftee Navies regularly committing heresy by letting officers get their hands on screwdrivers.
Clearly, Kris was walking a fine line between two different faiths. She would have to keep a tight lid on matters, or a holy war might break out right there in the drop bay of the
Fury
.
And she'd come over to the
Fury
thinking that all she had to worry about was the Longknife/Peterwald thing.
Silly her.
The GACs were ugly. They also looked deadly, with their seven-barrel cannon jutting out of their nose. These particular GACs had a thick coat of paint on them that cracked in several places as Kris's mechanics began going over them.
“I'd heard that the Greenfeld Navy was more interested in looking good than fighting good,” the chief muttered to Kris when the Greenfeld lieutenant was busy elsewhere. “If you're just planning on having them sit here and do nothing, a fresh coat of paint will make a hangar queen look pretty, even ferocious, if you paint growling tiger teeth on 'em,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the several craft sporting toothy grins.
“Are any of them ready to fly?” Kris asked.
“There's one in the back. Looks all scratched and dinged up. I think it's the one they actually fly.”
“These others?” Kris asked.
“Look good for inspections and photo ops for the admiral, don't they?”
Kris and Jack headed for the back. GAC-7 did look much the worse for wear. The Wardhaven mechs had a half dozen black boxes plugged into several ports and were muttering various incantations over the results that showed on their screens. The belly of the beast was already laid open, and several gizmos and boxes lay on the deck as the lieutenant showed Kris's chief his small hoard of spare parts.
The lieutenant came back grumbling. “Your chief. He wants to change out everything. He wants everything new. We don't have new. Not for this old pig. We have old. Very old. I think old is better for this hog.”
A few minutes later, the chief came back shaking his head. “I've looked in this hog's logbook. If they aren't lying, they've flown this thing five hundred hours in the last two years. Me, I wouldn't send my worst enemy out in this thing. Not in this condition. We got to do something here.”
“Can I fly it, Chief?” Kris asked, as Jack showed more and more alarm at just that prospect.
“I trained on this stuff back in B school, ma'am, though I'm not sure any of my crew have ever seen this stuff themselves. We got stuff on the
Wasp
that we should be able to plug into this hog. It won't be the exact replacement for the crap they have here. The stuff they got here we replaced fifteen, twenty years ago. But, with any luck, our new modules should swap right into these old slots.”
“Chief, will this be safe to fly?” Jack demanded.
“Captain, when you launch this hog, I swear to God, if you want me to, you can put a third seat out on the wing of this bird, and I will ride right along with you.”
“Yeah. And that way, he can fix anything that breaks,” one of the petty officers whispered.
“I heard that, Betty. I'll have them strap you under the other wing. You they can drop with the bombs.”
“I didn't say a word, Chief.”
Kris left the sailors to their work. For the better part of the next half hour, she and Jack had a nice long discussion about the stupidity of what she was about to do. As usual, when he had most of the strong points on his side, the argument went long.
But Kris had the strongest argument on her side. The lives of his and her Marines depended on her having the best possible knowledge of the situation and making the best possible call of where to land . . . or to call the whole thing off.
Grumbling, Jack finally gave up. “Why did I ever let myself get tied up with a Longknife,” he muttered, and went to check out what flight gear the Greenfeld folks had on hand.
A good thing, too. He rejected the first four sets offered, then called the chief in to do a thorough workup on the pressure suits that looked best.
Meanwhile, Kris checked in regularly with her team.
Chief Beni continued to have no success getting anything out of the alien site. They had hunkered down. Now there was nothing on the radio circuits. The chief could see footprints and vehicle tracks in the dust around the plant, but everyone appeared to have taken cover in the two sprawling buildings. The reactor was producing almost double its original power outputs. Several capacitors were charging up, but if there were lasers, they were still cold.
“Simply put, I know squat. Professor mFumbo and his boffins on the other ships, they know squat. These folks like to keep themselves a secret,” the chief finished.
After that report, Kris was not surprised to find out Penny's persistent efforts to open some kind of communication with the aliens had borne no fruit. She'd enlisted the boffins in her effort. But her distributed brain trust had no more luck talking to the aliens than Chief Beni had taking their pulse.
“They really don't want to get to know us,” Jack said, as Kris and he pulled on their green-camouflaged flight gear.
“Grampa Ray got into a long and bitter fight with the Iteeche because they could not figure out a way to talk to each other,” Kris muttered, half to herself. “Now I'm getting us humans and the Iteeche into a war with someone who will not talk to us, no matter how hard we try.”
“That's what it looks like,” Jack agreed, checking the neck gasket of Kris's suit.
“Maybe if we can capture someone from this site, we can sit them down and force them to talk,” Kris said, doing the same check for Jack.
“Somehow, I don't think hamburger and fries is going to make it happen,” Jack said, as he handed Kris her helmet. “Even if you throw in a strawberry shake.”
“Yeah,” Kris said. “I'm afraid that if we did capture a few, they'd suicide just like the ship that attacked us. It's crazy. Someone or something has scared the daylights out of these people. They'd rather die than live as prisoners. The question I can't figure out is whether or not the fear is for some really honking-huge bug-eyed monster or if it's what that guy on the video is telling them, and they all believe it?”
“It would be nice if we could figure out what that dude is saying,” Jack agreed.
Kris put on her helmet, dogged it down, and chinned the oxygen outlet. Gas whispered into the suit.
“Maybe we'll get lucky this time,” Jack said. His own helmet on, their conversation continued as a kind of radio check. “Maybe someone will survive the mass suicide. Maybe someone will choose life over death.”
“That's what I'm hoping,” Kris said. “Try something often enough, and you're bound to get what you want.”
Both the Greenfeld officer and command master chief were there to strap Kris into her strange ride. That was good. She banged her elbow on something hard.
“What's that?” she asked.
“It's always there,” the lieutenant answered, telling her nothing.
The chief ducked his head in the cockpit. “Oh, that's a crowbar.”
“Crowbar?” Jack echoed from his seat behind Kris.
“Yeah, back in the war they had problems getting the canopy open when they crashed. The pilots took to carrying crowbars with them. In the later refits, they actually hooked one to the side of the cockpit.”
“Don't worry, Jack. We aren't going to crash,” Kris said.
The reply from the guy in back didn't rise above a mumble.
Preflight finished, Kris flew GAC-7 over to the
Wasp
and tied into the drop bay but didn't leave the craft. The
Fury
went its way into a geosynchronous orbit thirty thousand klicks above the planet. The other four battleships, along with PatRon 10, dropped into low orbit. The tiny
Hermes
followed along in their wake.
The first orbit's pass showed them nothing new. They dropped probes that only verified that there was nothing to see. Two large, three- or four-story buildings sprawled in front of a steep ridge. The best guess was that a mine shaft of some sort projected down and into the rocky ridge. The best scientific opinion was that the pile of dirt beside one of the buildings was mine tailings, but the analysis of that residue didn't help them figure out what was going on inside the buildings.
The landing launches left the
Wasp
and battleships first. They would descend and loiter west of the site until Kris called them in. Kris detached from the
Wasp
last. Her descent would be steeper, letting her arrive over the aliens first.
Kris punched her braking engines, and whispered, “We're committed.”
“God help us,” Jack added.
Kris took the GAC across the alien site at fifty thousand feet, and came away none the wiser for it. She honked the craft around into a steeply descending turn and crossed it again at twenty thousand feet, hammering it with a sonic boom.
That triggered something.
“Lasers,” Chief Beni shouted on net. “Rockets, too! I'm getting all kind of search and attack stuff for SAM guidance.”
Kris slammed her craft into a right bank, then went immediately into a split S turn, diving for the ground at the same time.
Then the real fun started.
39
“Rockets are tracking us,” Jack shouted from the backseat.
Kris only had time to glance over her shoulder for a second. Behind her, the alien site was obscured by smoke as wave after wave of rockets were ripple fired.
Most headed up. A few were headed for Kris.