Terms of Enlistment (33 page)

There’s only static in response. Halley repeats the broadcast twice, but there’s no reply, not even the click of a toggled “send” button.

“I’m going to get us clear of this hull, and closer to the planet,” she says, and pulls the Wasp into a roll. I look at the Versailles through the side window of the cockpit until the battered frigate disappears from view.

“Versailles personnel, this is Stinger Six-Two,” Halley transmits again when we are clear of the Versailles’ bulk. “Anyone copy down there?”

This time, there’s a garbled response on the emergency channel. Halley looks at me and exhales with emphasis.

“Thank goodness. I was starting to think we’re all alone out here,” she says to me.

“Versailles personnel, stand by. I’m going into a lower orbit to improve reception. Next transmission in five.”

We coast away from the Versailles, and toward the planet below. Under other circumstances, the ride would be a spectacular sight-seeing tour. There’s nothing between us and the blue-green planet but a few avionics consoles and an inch of armored glass. The planet spread out in front of us is a pristine world of clean oceans, snow-capped mountain ranges, and wild and empty continents. The NAC colony is the only human presence on Willoughby, twelve hundred colonists on a planet two-thirds the size of Terra.

As we dip into a lower orbit, Halley rolls the ship around its dorsal axis to give us a better view of the outside. She has a very light hand on the controls, and the Wasp follows her input like a powerful, well-trained animal. I remember how difficult it was for me to simply get the nose of the simulated drop ship pointing the right way in Basic, and Halley says that the real thing is about five times more difficult to fly than the simulator.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” she says to me, and I nod in response.

“Look at all that land down there, and it’s all unsettled,” Halley says. “We could set this ship down in the middle of one of those continents and live on the supplies in the back for years. You’d get your wish early, about that patch of land on a colony planet.”

I laugh in response, but the thought of being marooned on a far-off world with Halley is almost indecently exciting for a moment.

“The Navy would come looking for us,” I say. “They’d want their drop ship back, and I doubt they’d be willing to forgive us the rest of our contract.”

“The hell they would. The Versailles is going to break up in atmo. Far as the Navy would know, we burned up in that hull, and the second drop ship never made it out of the flight deck.”

For a moment, I can’t tell whether she’s kidding, and the possibility hangs in the air between us almost like a physical thing. Then there’s another garbled transmission on the emergency channel, and the ear-grating sound of the mutilated broadcast serves to snap us both back into reality.

“I guess we shouldn’t have advertised that we’re up here with a working Wasp,” she says. “Makes it kind of hard to skip town unnoticed.”

“
Stinger Six-Two, do you read, over?
”

The voice on the emergency channel is suddenly perfectly clear, as if the broadcast is coming from our own cargo hold.

“Affirmative,” Halley replies. “Stinger Six-Two copies five by five. Broadcasting party, please identify.”

“Stinger Six-Two, this is the XO. What’s your status and location?”

“Stinger Six-Two is in orbit. We’re clear of the ship, and heading for the deck, sir.”

“Six-Two, do you have any ordnance loaded?”

Halley exchanges a glance with me.

“Uh, that’s a negative, sir. This is the spare drop ship. We just have gas in the tank, but the racks are bare.”

“Copy that, Six-Two. That’s too bad.”

Halley taps a few buttons on the tactical console before toggling back a reply.

“Sir, my TacLink node shows your pod four hundred klicks north of my position. I can be on top of you in twenty minutes.”

“Sooner would be better. Six-Two, do you have any weapons on board at all?”

“That’s affirmative, sir. We have a full weapons locker.”

“Outstanding,” the XO says, and the relief in his voice is unsettling. “Expedite your descent as much as safely possible. Don’t break your ship, because you’re the only hardware we have in the system right now.”

“What the hell is he talking about?” Halley asks me. “What about the other drop ship? That one’s fully armed with air-to-ground ordnance.”

I can only shrug in response.

“Sir, didn’t Six-One make it down to the surface with you?”

“If they did, they’re not talking to us. You can try to raise them on the way down. Now hurry up, we need you down here yesterday.”

“Affirmative, sir. We’re on our way.”

Halley cuts the comms and starts tapping buttons on her tactical console again.

“Flight profile for descent says we’ll be down on the deck in twenty-two minutes,” she says. “I’ll be goosing it all the way, so make sure you’re buckled in tight. It’s gonna be a bit bumpy.”

“What the hell is going on down there? He sounded like he’s scared shitless. You think the SRA’s trying to take the place?”

“I have no idea,” Halley replies as she adjusts our trajectory and points the nose of the Wasp below the far-off horizon.

“I guess we’ll find out in twenty minutes,” she says. “Now hold on, and shut up, will you?”

If the combat landings in the TA were a high-speed descent in an express elevator, the ride into Willoughby’s atmosphere from high orbit is like a rocket-assisted free fall down the elevator shaft. As we enter the upper layers of the planet’s atmosphere, Halley pulls up the nose to expose the ceramic belly armor of the Wasp to the heat generated by our high-speed entry. For a good ten minutes, I can’t see anything on the other side of the cockpit window but superheated gases streaming past in bright flares. Halley makes control inputs on her stick and throttle to keep the ship on the right angle and trajectory, but the results of her corrections are too subtle for be to feel. To me, it feels like we’re just falling into the atmosphere belly-first, and only Halley’s calm and focused demeanor keeps me from full-blown panic. When the fireworks outside the cockpit finally subside, the blackness of space has given way to the bright, pale blue of a clear sky.

“Altitude one hundred thousand,” Halley announces, more to herself than for my benefit.

“Ever done this all by yourself?” I ask.

“Not without Lieutenant Rickman riding shotgun in the left seat. Relax, Andrew. I know what I’m doing here.”

“Never doubted it,” I say, and claw the molded armrests of my seat as she increases thrust and pulls the Wasp into a banking turn.

“They got some shitty weather down there,” Halley says when we pass through twenty thousand feet. “All I see is storms. I thought this place was terraformed.”

I look outside at the top of the cloud cover, a roiling mass of gray and black that extends from one end of the horizon to the other.

“Just because it’s terraformed doesn’t mean it’s like Earth in springtime,” I say, remembering Sergeant Fallon’s words back at the Medical Center.

“Well, if this is what it looks like after they had the atmo exchangers running for a decade, I don’t want to know what it looked like when the survey ship got here. Hang on, this is going to be a bit bumpy.”

Halley has a gift for understatement. As we enter the cloud cover above Willoughby’s surface, the ship gets whipped around like a plastic bag on a wind-swept sidewalk. We’re in the clouds just a few moments before rain starts hammering the thick glass of the cockpit, fat drops that sound like heavy-caliber small arms fire hitting the window panels. I shoot Halley a worried glance, but she’s focused on her instruments and flight controls. There’s nothing I can do to help get us down on the ground in one piece, so I do my best to merge with the thin padding on my armored seat.

“This weather is fucked up,” Halley says after a while. “We’re at five thousand, and it’s twenty-five degrees celsius out there. It’s like fucking Florida in late spring.”

“Too warm?”

“For this rock? Hell, yes. Weather briefing yesterday said they’re just above freezing this time of year.”

We finally break out of the cloud cover over muddy brown terrain that looks entirely too close for comfort. Halley levels out the ship and banks slightly to the right to get a good look at the planet surface below.

“Wow, that mess went almost all the way down,” she says. “We’re fifteen hundred feet above the deck.”

“Versailles personnel, this is Stinger Six-Two,” Halley broadcasts. “I’m a hundred and ten klicks out from your position. ETA five minutes. Can you find me a nice flat spot and pop some IR smokers?”

“Copy, Six-Two,” a voice replies on the emergency channel. “Uh, negative on the smokers. We have hostiles in the neighborhood. Just home in on the pod and set down as close as you can. And have that ramp down, ‘cause we need to evac in a hurry.”

“Six-Two, copy,” Halley replies, and then gives me a bewildered look.

“Hostiles? What the hell is he talking about? My threat board is blank.”

“Native wildlife?” I offer, and Halley shakes her head.

“Ain’t nothing living down there except what came in on the colony ship, except for some algae.”

“Chinese or Russians? Think they have troops on the ground?”

“I don’t fucking know, Andrew,” Halley replies. “All I know is that I wish we actually had some ordnance on those pylons, ‘cause if we bump into someone who needs shooting, all we can do is flip ‘em the bird.”

The escape pod looks like a projectile from a giant cannon. It’s lying on its side on a gently sloping hillside, lines from the retardation parachute draped all over it like bright orange vines. Halley makes a low pass over the site, and I can see several people down by the pod, waving at us with urgent gestures.

“Well, that looks flat enough,” she says. “Hang on, I’m putting down in that spot over there.”

We coast in at a low angle and touch down on the surface less than a hundred yards from the stranded escape pod. As soon as the Wasp has come to a rest on all three skids, Halley cuts the throttle and punches a button on her console. Behind us, I hear the familiar whine of an opening cargo hatch. A few moments later, we hear several pairs of boots running up the ramp and into the cargo bay.

“Don’t bother unstrapping, pilot,” an out-of-breath voice says over the emergency channel. “You get airborne and close that hatch as soon as I say, you hear?”

“Copy that,” Halley replies.

There’s more tromping behind us as more crewmembers thunder up the cargo ramp.

“Dustoff,” the out-of-breath voice shouts into the comms. “Get us the hell off the ground, now.”

Halley hits the cargo door switch with her palm, seizes the stick and throttle again, and gooses the engines. “Hang on to something back there,” she shouts into the intercom and pulls the Wasp into a vertical climb. She swings the tail of the ship around and points the nose back the way we came. Then we pick up speed again and climb back into the cloud cover. Not even thirty seconds have elapsed since our ship’s skids touched down on the planet’s surface.

Back in the cargo hold, the XO claims the jump seat of the crew chief and plugs himself into the ship’s intercom circuit. The armored hatch between the cockpit and the cargo hold is open, and I can see crew members opening the arms locker and distributing small arms, even though the drop ship is once again getting bounced around by turbulence.

“Talk to me, sir,” Halley says. “What’s going on down there?”

“We have a non-native species down there, that’s what,” the XO replies.

Halley and I share an incredulous look. The spacefaring nations of Earth have close to a hundred colony planets and moons as far out as Zeta Reticuli, and nobody has ever encountered any life on those that could be observed without a microscope.

“Non-native species?” Halley repeats. “What, like fucking
aliens
?”

“Yes, like fucking aliens,” the XO says. “Unless the colonists brought along livestock that’s eighty fucking feet tall. Now find us some better weather and stay the hell away from the ground, you copy?”

Halley takes the ship back up through the clouds. The ride up isn’t quite as bone-jarring as the descent had been, but I still breathe a sigh of relief when we break through the cloud ceiling and the skies are blue once more.

“We’re clear of the chop,” Halley tells the XO over the intercom. “Where do you want me to take this thing? I have forty-five minutes of fuel left.”

Behind us, Commander Campbell unbuckles from the crew chief’s jump seat, and walks up to the cockpit, where he crouches between our high-backed pilot seats.

“Ensign, how far is the nearest colony settlement from our current datum?” he asks Halley. She checks her nav screen and shrugs her shoulders.

“I have no idea, sir. This is the spare bird, remember? All the databanks are blank. We didn’t get to upload any nav data before we left. I can get a satellite fix and tell you our coordinates, but I have nothing else on my map.”