On Silver Wings (4 page)

She slid them on, cinching the waist and buckling them up with two simple motions, and retrieved an assault vest. Once that was in place she flashed a wry smile at the observers, “Better?”

Only Tara smiled back, nodding. “Much. Less distracting at least. You might find the color to be a little sweltering here, though. We prefer lighter colors and clothing, it reflects the heat.”

“Heat’s not my main concern,” Sorilla replied, attaching a bracer to her left wrist. “But these are versatile.”

Tara was about to ask, but was spared the need when a simple tap on the bracer caused the clothing to shift colors to a light tan and khaki combination that was more suited to the jungle heat.

“I’m impressed,” the nurse admitted, half smiling.

Sorilla smiled briefly, then frowned and looked over at her nurse. “What happened here?”

Tara fell silent for another moment, her eyes falling as she considered the question. “It happened a few months ago... no warning at all. Several buildings around the main colony site... well, I don’t know really. Some of us think they exploded, but I was there. There was no smoke, no fire... Just dust and debris flying...”

Same as what hit us,
Sorilla thought, her expression pensive.

“They landed just after that... we couldn’t see them, but they ripped through the colony center like... monsters,” Tara went on, stammering and stuttering as she remembered the night of ghosts and horror, “Things would be normal, then suddenly it would get cold and there would be this sudden quiet... and then, blood and dying... people were panicking, talk of ghosts and demons... it was...”

Tara closed her eyes and shook her head slightly, unwilling to say more for a moment.

Active camouflage units,
Sorilla filled in mentally, trying to determine the nature of the weapons in use from the nurse’s descriptions.
White noise generators, maybe environmental power converters as well. Never seen any that were portable like that before, though.

“We abandoned the colony within hours... ran into the jungle. They chased us, but it’s a big jungle...”

“And your people know it well.” Sorilla said without question.

“Of course,” Tara shrugged, “The main colony site had been there for almost a hundred and ten years. This is our world.”

That basically told the whole story, as far as Sorilla was concerned. Her units were generally deployed solely to Earth, given that most of the war fighting in the known systems happened there. Terrorist groups, religious fundamentalists, and ‘freedom fighters’ in the Middle East, Africa, South America, and Asia kept her and her peers well trained and occupied.

And the various assignments she’d had into those areas had taught her one thing. You don’t chase the locals into their backyard, not without a secure firebase and lots of backup. Once the colonists made it into the jungle, they were playing on their home field, not the enemies. Within the city, those advantages were easy enough to negate.

Sensors could pick people out among buildings, pre-planning could outline strategies, contingencies, and all sorts of nastiness for the colonists within the static environment of the colony. In the living jungle, however, those advantages were out the window. Local fauna and flora would scramble and degrade even the most advanced sensors to ranges of little use, turning the attackers’ advantage against them and returning the home court to the defenders.

Sorilla consulted the intel that had been preloaded into her implants before the mission automatically, calling up the location of the main colony site. “Your central site is about a hundred kilometers due south of here.”

It hadn’t really been a question, but the nurse answered anyway.

“That’s right.”

“I’m going to need a local guide. Just one,” the soldier said as she laced up a pair of shin high combat boots and straightened up.

The movement of standing straight made her dizzy, and Sorilla closed her eyes for a moment, wavering in place.

“Oh no, you are not ready for any treks through the jungle!” The nurse objected, her soft voice growing sharp and commanding.

“Doesn’t matter,” She replied, wincing as she pushed she feeling down. “Concussions take time to heal... we’re out of that. I’ll need that guide.”

Tara frowned, grimacing herself, but only sighed aloud. “You’ll need to talk to Samuel.”

“Then let’s do that, shall we?”

*****

She got her guide, despite the protests of Tara, a man named Jerry Reed, whom she was told was one of the better pathfinders. They left within an hour of her walking out of the hut she’d slept in for three days, against the advice of the local medic and her own implants, but she knew that time was more important of a factor than it had begun as.

The fleet would wait out past the heliopause only so long before coming in, and when they did, she had to have things ready and waiting for them.

That was what brought her to the knoll upon which she currently crouched, the local pathfinder laying stretched out on the ground beside her, looking across to where the colony site resided on the large plateau that rose from the jungle.

“It’s quiet,” Jerry said, reaching for a pair of imagers.

She restrained his hand, shaking her head. “Don’t.”

“What? Why?”

“Those use active lasers for range finding.” She told him, eyes fixed on the site that lay three miles down from their location. “Right equipment on the other side and that’s like wearing a nice big sign saying ‘shoot me’.”

Jerry grimaced, laying the imagers aside. “So how are we supposed to see anything from here?”

“Take this,” she said, pulling a small chunk of plastic from a pouch and handing it to him.

He recognized it easily enough as a portable computer system, its flexible screen tucked away inside the protective plastic shell. He pulled it open with a jerk, shaking his head, “What good is this going... holy...”

“It’s linked to the imaging system built into my implants.” She told him as he found himself looking at a close up of the Colony’s center of government. “I’ve got liquid lenses floating over my eyes... a little computer adjustment to the surface tension and...”

The scene zoomed in even closer, focusing on a window over six kilometers away.

“And in we go,” she said, her voice dropping, “Looks deserted.”

The pathfinder nodded, “That’s what I said. Quiet.”

“Why hit the colony if they weren’t going to move in?” Sorilla asked rhetorically.

Jerry snorted, “Better question. Why hit the colony at all? There’s nothing of extreme value here... some plants that can be processed into some useful pharmaceuticals, but nothing spectacular. Local geology isn’t anything special either, richer than Earth for metals and such, but nothing compared to any asteroid belt in any of a thousand stars within jump range.”

Sorilla had to remind herself that Jerry wasn’t the ‘classic’ definition of a pathfinder. That type of man and woman had really faded from the scene hundreds of years earlier, the last true versions of them dying out as the last continental wilderness was settled and ‘civilized’ on Earth. A few still existed in odd places back home, but they were rare and were the exception rather than the rule now. It was out on the colonies that Pathfinders and their traditions still existed, and always would, but they had different jobs now.

Hunting wasn’t a priority here, the local fauna wasn’t edible anyway, so Jerry’s job was that of a surveyor with a little botanist tossed in for good measure. He had to know the rifle he had slung at his side, to be sure, since the local animals weren’t always the most pleasant types, but odds were he knew his way around a pocket processor a lot more.

“There aren’t more than three worlds with jump range of Earth that can support life,” Sorilla replied, “That’s just basic statistics. Hayden’s World is three jumps out, and in that entire sphere we’ve only found a total of fifteen planets we can live on... after a fashion.”

“And Hayden is the most earthlike we’ve ever found,” Jerry replied dryly, “I know the story.”

“Well, you might be looking at a flat out land grab.” She told him, “Still one or two countries back home that might think they can get away with it.”

Jerry shook his head, “You weren’t there when the colony was hit. Those weren’t humans, they were ghosts.”

Sorilla didn’t respond as she continued examining the colony from a distance. There was no such thing as ghosts, she knew. If there were, she would have seen them by now. Some of the things she seen and done would have sent them back to haunt her.

Just the same, as she looked at the apparently abandoned colony site through the intense magnification afforded her by the liquid drops her implants had drawn up in a bubble over each eye, she had to admit something.

The Hayden Capital looked a lot like a ghost town.

In the sweltering heat of the jungle sun, Sorilla shivered a bit, but put the thought aside and moved on.

“Wait here.”

“What? Where are you going??”

“I’m going in closer.” She told her guide. “If I’m not back by morning, head back to camp. I can find my own way back now.”

Jerry glared at her, “Like hell! This is breeding season, dammit! You step in the wrong pond out here and you’ll be eaten alive before the Kyraoptis realize you aren’t digestible!”

“I was briefed on the local fauna, I’ll avoid the water,” she promised. “Just wait here.”

Then she simply turned and stepped off the mound they were on, gliding easily down into the trees and vanishing into the jungle. Jerry watched with grudging respect, knowing that he could have matched the move, but probably with less grace.

“Damn it,” He muttered, shaking his head. “All the way out here, right in sight of home... and now I’m supposed to wait.”

*****

Even the persistent headache she was battling with didn’t keep Sorilla from making the six kilometer hike to the edge of the colony in a little under thirty minutes. She paused before she would have lost the cover of the jungle and found a place to rest as the sun continued its drop toward the horizon.

She and Jerry had made the hundred klick hike out in two days, actually just a little more than one, but as they’d neared the colony they had continually slowed their pace. Now, with the buildings only a stone’s throw away, Sorilla slowed to a halt and hunkered down. The active camouflage built into her vest and pants were now a dark blue green to match the color of the large, fuzzy leaves of the alien jungle she was waiting in, and the heat began to climb as the material she wore absorbed more and more of the incoming wavelengths.

First rule of warfare after staying alive was keeping your head down. An old way to say keep out of sight, and the best way she knew to do that was to send nothing back to where someone might notice it. No light, no sound, nothing at all if it could be helped. The sun baked her in the shade of the jungle canopy, but Sergeant Sorilla Aida waited it out. She wished she hadn’t had to leave her suit back in camp to trickle charge off its solar cells, however. Its environmental control systems had spoiled her.

She smirked slightly into the wavy shimmer of the heat baked jungle air and squirmed a little tighter into the tree she’d picked out, making herself that much smaller and, hopefully, harder to tell apart from the alien plant. Too much comfort in her life, she supposed, if she were already whining about a little heat and sweat.

She watched the shadows lengthen until the time for waiting was over and then pushed off the tree and dropped easily to the ground. Before setting out, she swallowed a pair of analgesic tablets, hoping to push the ache in her skull a little further into the background, and then she began to move forward into the colony as the sounds of the jungle night began to come alive around her.

Approaching the colony, Sorilla shifted her grip on her assault weapon, moving slowly along the side of a building and keeping to the shadows as she looked slowly around. Her eyes had the faint green glow that indicated her OLED heads up displays were operating, their molecular thin film filtering the light spectrum as it passed, overlaying infrared heat emanations on the regular light of the colony’s streets. Beyond a couple meters the gleam of the OLED light was invisible, but within that range she looked like a supernatural demon on the prowl.

The result from her point of view was a multicolor spectacular that showed the buildings and world around her according to their heat dissipation levels in the night air. The concrete was a steady, even yellow while the metal was already dropping from the dull pink to a cooler blue as the material shed its heat quicker.

Nothing alive, however. Just the predictable heat decay of a ghost town in the dark jungle night.

She moved around a corner, rifle to her shoulder, leading the way with its muzzle, and swept the next street and buildings with smooth, economical, motions. Still nothing, though. Just a silence that felt even more unnatural after the constant life that existed in the jungles. She moved through the streets quickly, making her way to the first signs of damage from the attack.

It had been a microwave transmission tower, she could tell. The metal structure was twisted and bent, crumpled in on itself like it had been caught up in some giant’s grip and simply crushed. She quickly lost count of all the things that didn’t make sense about the scene. The debris pattern, the damage itself, hell almost none of it was what she’d come to expect.

This wasn’t a bomb...
She blinked away the thermal overlay, moving through the twisted metal of the tower, idly kicking over the microwave dish.
Strange.

She moved on, heading to the center of the colony, where the next item on her list had been located.

The orbital tether had occupied the town square, though it was actually more of a town circle, a centerpiece and probably the most vital part of the colony’s community. The tether was their link to space, to home. It had been connected to a pre-fabricated orbital habitat that had once housed the colonists while they were en-route to Hayden’s World.

While the colonists would have been preparing themselves for planetfall, the command crew would set the ‘anchor’. The three inch thick, three foot wide carbon nano-mesh tether would have been lowered in a rather dangerous procedure, and then anchored deep into the center of the chosen colony site. Once that was done, the command module’s engines were shut down and the rotation of the planet took over the job of keeping it in orbit, like a counterweight swinging on the end of a string.