Terms of Enlistment (36 page)

A few moments later, Commander Campbell appears in the cockpit hatch behind us. He grabs hold of both our seats to steady himself and leans over to my side of the ship to look at the ground below. Without a word of explanation, Halley merely puts the ship into a gentle portside turn to give him a better view of the graveyard the colony has become.

“My God,” the XO says in a toneless voice.

“All the buildings are intact,” I say. “I don’t see any damage at all. What the hell did they do to them?”

“Fucked if I know,” Halley replies. “But if you don’t mind, Commander, I’d rather not land this thing and risk contamination.”

I hadn’t even considered a ChemWar attack, but now that Halley voices her concern, I feel very uneasy about our low flight level. I know it’s just my overactive, terrified brain playing tricks on me, but I imagine a cloud of lethal contaminant getting stirred up by the downdraft of the ship’s engines. Back in ChemWar class, we were shown videos of chemical and biological attacks from the last major tiff with the Chinese and Koreans back on Earth, and the closeups of hapless NAC troopers who died by choking on their bloody vomit left a lasting impression in my memory.

“Let’s not,” the XO agrees. “I don’t feel like puking out my lungs today. Take her back up and let’s get on the radio, see if anyone’s made it out of there. Maybe their Marines had their suits on.”

We circle above the settlement at high altitude for a while, trying to contact the Marines that may have made it out of the city. Halley sends challenges on the Marine field frequency for twenty minutes while flying a holding pattern, but once again, there’s no reply.

“If they’re within fifty miles, they should hear us,” she says. “I can’t do this much longer if we want to make it back to the terraformer on what’s left in the tank.”

“Understood,” the XO says. “Make another loop south, and then let’s head back to the barn.”

“That’s a whole lot of flying done for nothing,” I say to Halley in a low voice, careful to keep my finger away from the transmit button. She merely shrugs in response.

“Beats sitting on our asses and waiting for the next Navy boat to come pick us up.”

There’s a soft chirp on her TacLink console, and she turns her attention to it. She taps the screen, reads the display for a moment, and then sits up straight with a jolt.

“What is it?” I ask, dreading more bad news heading our way.

“Emergency transponder,” she says. “It’s the other drop ship from the Versailles. Stinger Six-One.”

Her fingers do a rapid little dance on the comms console as she goes to a different frequency.

“Stinger Six-One, this is Halley in Six-Two. I’m picking up your beacon two-niner miles to my south. If anyone down there can hear me, please respond.”

Again, we get no reply. Halley repeats the broadcast two more times, and then lets out an exasperated little snort.

“I swear, this is the Planet of Broken Fucking Radios or something. I’m getting tired of talking to myself out here.”

She toggles her intercom button.

“Commander, I’m picking up the emergency beacon from our other drop ship. I’m going to try and eyeball the site, check if anyone’s made it out.”

“Go ahead,” the XO says.

When we’re back in the weather, Halley runs a radar sweep of the ground ahead of us. I look over at her sensor screen as the display shows a wedge-shaped segment of the planet surface below and in front of us, swept from side to side in short intervals by the focused beam from the drop ship’s radar transmitter.

“We don’t usually run continuous ground sweeps like that,” Halley says when she notices that I’m watching the screen. “That radar lights up threat warning receivers like a Christmas tree. If we had SRA down there, it would be like turning on a huge billboard that says ‘Shoot Me’.”

“You know what? I almost wish those were just SRA troopers down there,” I say, and she smiles.

“Yeah. Who would have thought we’d ever wish for that, huh?”

Suddenly, the ship transitions out of the heavy cloud cover and into clear weather with startling abruptness. One moment, we’re flying among drifting bands of rain in zero visibility, the next moment we’re in calm skies. I look out of the port cockpit window in surprise and see a wall of clouds receding behind the ship. I can see the ground a few thousand feet below us. It looks like we just crossed into the eye of a hurricane. We’re in a huge bowl of calm weather that looks like it’s twenty miles or more across.

“Holy living fuck,” Halley says next to me, in a tone of profound awe and astonishment.

In front of the ship, right in the center of this clear patch of sky, there’s an enormous spire reaching into the sky. It’s the color of dirty snow, and so tall that I can’t see the top of it even after craning my neck and peering through the top panel of the drop ship’s windshield. In relation to its height, the structure seems impossibly thin, but even at this distance, it’s obvious that the trunk is a few hundred yards in diameter. It flares out at the bottom like the lower section of a tree.

“What the
hell
is that?”

“You want to come up here and take a look at this, sir,” Halley tells the XO, who promptly unstraps from his jump seat once more and steps forward into the cockpit.

“Jesus,” he says when he sees the spire rising into the dark clouds ahead of us.

“I have nothing on radar,” Halley says in astonishment.

“Come again?”

“It’s not showing on radar,” she replies, and cycles through display modes on her screen. “Ground radar, air-to-air mode, millimeter wave--not a damn thing. If the weather hadn’t cleared up back there all of a sudden, we could have flown right into that thing without ever seeing it.”

“Looks like they’ve been busy,” the XO says. “They’ve built that thing in less than a month?”

To me, the structure rising from the surface of the planet doesn’t look
built
at all. There are no visible supports, no protrusions or seams. The surface of the spire looks smooth and uninterrupted. It looks like an enormous tree stripped of its bark.

“The emergency beacon is five degrees off our bow, four miles ahead,” Halley says. “Right near the base of
that
.”

“Just fly around it for now,” the XO orders. “Keep your distance. I don’t want to add another crash beacon to the first one.”

The patch of calm weather seems to be perfectly circular, and the tall, white structure is right in the center of it. Halley turns the Wasp to the left, putting us on a course that’s parallel to the outer walls of this strange eye in the storm.

“It shows up on infrared,” she says. “It’s not like a furnace or anything, but it’s definitely throwing out some heat.”

“Yeah, but what the hell
is
it?”

I lean forward to look up through the top windshield panel again. The clouded sky overhead is a little lighter in color that the wall of clouds towering to the left of the ship in the distance, and as I look at the cloud cover directly above the Wasp, I get a sense of swift movement, like a front of storm clouds rushing across the sky in a high wind. The flood of lead-gray clouds is pouring straight out from the center of the storm’s eye and flowing toward the walls.

“It’s a terraformer,” I say. “Atmospheric exchanger, whatever
they
call it. Look at that.”

Halley follows my gaze with her own, and the XO leans forward over the center console to get a glimpse of what we’re looking at.

“I think you may be right, Mister Grayson,” he says. “And if that’s the case, I think we’re off this rock for good.”

He retreats from his uncomfortably stretched position, and settles in a crouch between the pilot seats.

“It took us fifteen fucking years to build a terraforming network on this rock and get it fit for people to live on. If these things can waltz in here and set up a working network of their own in three weeks...”

He leaves the sentence unfinished, but I get the sentiment. If this is a working atmospheric exchanger, the alien species is so much more advanced that trying to compete with them for the same real estate would be like showing up at an architecture competition with a child’s erector set and a few rolls of polymer sheets.

“Let’s get a little closer to that beacon, but be careful.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” Halley replies. “You may want to buckle in again back there, just in case.”

We make a wide turn to the right, until the enormous white spire is right in the center of the Wasp’s windshield. The appearance of it somehow matches that of the beings which erected it--tall, thin, graceful, and imposing. Halley does a quick measurement with the optical targeting system of the Wasp, and declares that the structure ahead measures twenty-eight hundred feet from its base to the point where the stem disappears in the clouds overhead.

“I’m getting the faintest return on radar now,” she says. “I’m going to stop painting it with the beam. Don’t want to piss off the locals.”

From our position, the spot where the beacon is sending out its regular, mindless electronic wails is on the opposite side of the huge stem. Halley decreases altitude while taking the ship around the trunk in a left-hand turn that gives me a perfect view of the structure. By now, we’re less than a quarter mile away from it, and I can see small imperfections in the surface I hadn’t noticed before, irregular bumps and knots that reinforce the grown look of the spire.

“Five hundred feet up,” Halley says. “That’s about as low as I care to go, I think.”

The place where the other drop ship crashed into the planet’s surface is easy to spot. There’s an impact mark on the ground, just a few hundred feet from the base of the spire, and a scorched furrow leading away from the initial mark. At the end of the blackened scar in the rocky soil, there’s a debris field, and the shattered wreck of what was once Stinger Six-One. The remains of the drop ship are mangled so badly that I wouldn’t recognize it if I didn’t know what a Wasp looks like in undamaged condition. Halley makes a low pass over the crash site, and I can see that parts of the wreckage are still burning.

“See any chutes?” Halley asks.

“I don’t know. What am I looking for?”

“The outside of the canopy is camo, and the inside orange. You can use ‘em as signal markers for the SAR birds.”

I look around the crash site as we circle overhead, but I don’t see anything other than broken and twisted bits of drop ship. When I glance over to the base of the alien structure, I notice something else, however--there are scorch marks and impact splatters marring the surface of the spire.

“Looks like your buddies tried to take a chunk out of it,” I say to Halley, and point to the damage. She looks over to the stem and observes the impact marks for a moment.

“Well, shit. So they did. The dumbass Rickman thinks with his balls most of the time. Figures he’d make an attack run on that thing.”

“Wonder how they brought that ship down. Think they got weapons?”

“I’m not too interested in finding out,” Halley says. “Let’s get out of here before we do.”

“Attention, all Versailles personnel. This is the XO. Remain at your location, and do not attempt to reach any colony settlements. We have hostile invaders on this planet, and you are ordered to lay low and avoid contact until our rescue ship arrives. I repeat, do not attempt to contact or reach any colony settlements, and do not engage unless attacked.”

We’re cruising at high altitude, far above the weather, and the XO is broadcasting the same message every few minutes. We have received a few replies from our people stranded below, but the XO has denied all requests for pickups, much to my relief. I don’t want to leave our people stranded, of course, but they’d be no better off in the hold of the drop ship than they are near their escape pods on the ground, and I don’t want to go back into the mess below and discover more bad news. In any case, our remaining fuel is barely enough to get us safely back to the terraforming station where we left the rest of our crew.

“Talk about a one-sided ass-kicking,” Halley says to me while the XO keeps himself busy with the ship’s radio suite back in the crew chief’s seat. “Our ship’s gone, our colony’s wiped out, and now they’re just setting up shop down there.”

“I don’t think they even tried to kick our asses,” I say, and shudder at the fresh memory of hundreds of colonists lying dead in the streets of the main settlement, with no apparent injuries, or damage to the buildings. “That place back there wasn’t wiped out. Just fumigated. Like you’d smoke out a bunch of ants in your kitchen cabinet, you know? Toss in a pest stick, come back to mop up the dead stuff later.”

“That’s a cheery thought,” she says. “Like we don’t even rate real weapons.”

To our left, the local sun, Capella A, is just about to touch the horizon. The sun looks bigger and more washed out than our sun back on Earth, but the display is still spectacular, like a hydrogen bomb going off in the distance. The sky on the horizon is a brilliant palette of orange, red, and dark purple. I watch my first extrasolar sunset for a while, and it occurs to me that I can’t remember ever having sat down just to watch a sunset back on Earth.