Chains of Command (28 page)

“Maybe they all dropped dead, and we can just waltz in and call the Fleet for a pickup,” I offer.

“Wouldn’t hurt my feelings any.”

A few minutes later, Lieutenant Dorian chimes in over the shipboard intercom channel again.

“We’re in the radio shadow of the anchorage, and there’s nothing on the scope. I’d say we’re safe for low-power tight beam comms.”

I send a coded message to the rest of the flight, a two-digit number that takes a millisecond to transmit. A few seconds later, we get three separate transmissions back.

“Rogue Actual, this is Rogue One Actual. The threat board is green. Transmitting tactical now.”

Our ship is in the lead, so our optical sensors can see a good hundred kilometers further into the distance than those of the following ships. Our Blackfly’s computer sends its sensor information to the three other ships in a millisecond burst.

“Rogue One Actual, Rogue Actual,” Major Masoud replies. “Confirming data link. Proceed to your deployment point and commence mission.”

I send my acknowledgment back and slowly let out a long breath. The riskiest part of the ingress is over, but we are still way behind enemy lines, and a very long way from any backup.

“Let’s head to Deployment Point Alpha,” I tell Lieutenant Dorian. “So far, so good.”

“I’ll reserve judgment until we have our skids on the ground,” he replies, in a very Halley-like burst of realistic pessimism.

Deployment Point Alpha is in a river valley between two low mountain chains. The mountains in this place are wild and craggy, bare of vegetation or snow. They remind me of the landscape I’ve seen while flying over Iceland on Earth.

“Holy shit,” Lieutenant Dorian says when we crest the ridge and drop into the valley beyond. “Look at the goddamn greenery outside.”

The valley in front of us has a stream running right through the middle of it, and both sides of the riverbed are lined with trees, many square kilometers of them. The sight is so surreal that it makes me feel like I’ve come down with a sudden flash fever. None of the colonies we’ve settled have had vegetation on them that wasn’t raised in a hydroponic greenhouse and used for food purposes, but the trees whose tops we are skimming over at only a few dozen feet altitude are most definitely not food. They look like fir trees, Earth firs, something I’ve never seen away from our home planet.

“What the fuck,” I say.

“That’s thousands of trees,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “How the hell did they get all those out here?”

“Beats me,” I reply. “I don’t suppose there’s a chance they’re native flora?”

We put down the ship in a clearing in the middle of this surreal forest. Lieutenant Dorian uses the retractable wheels on the Blackfly’s landing skids to roll the ship underneath the tree canopy to camouflage it from above, and I give the platoon the signal to get ready for disembarking.

“Get them out and set up perimeter security,” I tell Sergeant Fallon.

“On your feet, and let’s get out of this fucking thing,” Sergeant Fallon says to the troops. “Charge your weapons and stand ready to deploy by squads.”

Thirty-eight troopers get out of their jump seats and cycle the actions on their carbines. The light above the tail ramp jumps from red to green, and the crew chief punches the controls to open the ramp. It lowers itself with that soft hydraulic hiss particular to the Blackfly, and First and Second Squads are on the trot before the bottom of the ramp even hits the dirt.

It’s almost comical to watch the SI troopers rush out of the cargo hold and down the ramp, only to slow down perceptibly once they have their boots in the dirt and their eyes on the environment outside.

“Stop the sightseeing,” Philbrick shouts from the rear of First Squad. “Perimeter, eight to twelve o’clock, numbskulls.”

First Squad swarms out on the port side of the drop ship, and Third Squad deploys to the starboard side. Second Squad takes the tail end, and within twenty seconds of the first set of SI boots on the ground, the troopers have established a 360-degree security perimeter around the drop ship, fifty meters away, weapons pointed in all directions.

I charge my own weapon and follow Sergeant Fallon out of the hold and into daylight. As I step off the ramp, my boots land on a soft cushion of soil and discarded pine needles. Sergeant Fallon raises her visor and looks up at the crowns of the trees.

“Pop your face shield,” she tells me.

I raise the shield on my helmet. The air smells like pine resin—the real thing, not the artificial scent from chemical dispensers. The only thing that’s missing to make the scene completely surreal is the chirping of birds, but there are no sounds other than the wind rustling the trees and the engines of the drop ship behind us whispering in idle mode, ready for a hasty departure if it turns out to be needed.

I walk over to the nearest tree, let my rifle hang from its sling, and touch the bark. It feels rough under the gloves of my armor. If it didn’t take a minute or two to unseal the armor, I’d take the gloves off to check the feel with my bare skin, but they look and smell and feel real enough. These are Earth trees, without a doubt. Whether they were transplanted here or grown in this spot, their seeds came from our home planet, a hundred and fifty light-years away.

“What the fuck,” I say again.

Sergeant Fallon walks up next to me and touches the trunk of the tree as well. She runs her hands up and down the bark almost lovingly. Then she looks up at the crown of the fir and squints.

“How tall do you reckon this thing is? Eighteen, twenty meters?”

“More like twenty-five,” I reply, using the known scale of a Lanky as a guide.

“Twenty-five-meter trees,” she says, and pats the trunk. “I know you kids don’t know shit about trees these days. But even if that’s a fast-growing variety, that tree is twenty years old.”

“You mean to suggest they planted these things two decades ago? That this place has been colonized for at least twenty years, and they’ve managed to keep it a secret from the rest of us?”

“Well, the trees are here, without a doubt,” she says. “Which means they planted them here, or took saplings or older trees from Earth. You really think they had the space to ship thousands of fir trees a hundred and fifty light-years?”

“No, I don’t,” I say. Transporting cargo over interstellar distances is insanely expensive—by far the most costly aspect of colonization is hauling the five thousand tons of material for each ready-to-build atmospheric terraforming unit. Cargo weight is so controlled that SI and Fleet personnel have a fixed and very low weight limit for personal possessions. Nobody would try to haul a million tons of trees when they can take along the seeds for a tiny fraction of the weight.

I look around, at the hundreds of trees in view. With the nearby mountain ridge in the background and the fluffy white clouds in the clean blue sky, it looks beautiful, pastoral, prettier than anything I’ve ever seen on Earth. From the air, it looked like the valley is full of these trees, thousands and thousands of Earth plants that have no practical purpose beyond just being here.

Beyond making the place look like Earth, I think.

“How long have they been fixing this moon up?” I wonder out loud.

Sergeant Fallon picks up her rifle from where she had propped it against the trunk of the nearby tree, and checks the loading status again out of habit.

“Apparently, since just after you were born,” she says. “And nobody knew a goddamn thing about this place until now. Makes you wonder what the hell else they’ve kept for themselves all these years, don’t it?”

CHAPTER 22

“What in the high holy hell are those?” Sergeant Fallon asks when Gunny Philbrick and his squad open one of the modular equipment cases they carried out of the Blackfly’s armory.

The case contains three dozen tiny, spindle-shaped devices that look like toy versions of Fleet warships. They’re set into protective foam and neatly lined up in three rows of twelve. Gunny Philbrick takes one out of the case and rests it on his palm. It’s barely longer than his hand and half as wide.

“That’s our little eye in the sky,” he says. “RQ-900 micro-drone.” He turns it in his hand and holds it out to Sergeant Fallon, who looks at it with interest. “Surely you had something like that on hand in the Territorial Army.”

“Something like that,” she says. “But they weren’t that small. That thing is tiny.”

“Bigger on the inside.” Philbrick grins. “Full passive sensor package. High-res camera array with thousand-millimeter lenses. TacLink integration. Whatever these things see, we’ll see a few seconds later.”

“Neat,” Sergeant Fallon says. “What’s the range?”

“A hundred kilometers’ mission radius, give or take a dozen depending on altitude. But you can cover a lot of ground with those cameras from fifteen thousand feet up. Saves us a lot of legwork.”

Philbrick and his squad set up the thirty-six recon drones with a speed and efficiency that comes from practice. We’d get more coverage from a recon run with the drop ship, but it’s much larger and more obvious, and it would burn too much of the fuel we may need for close air support later. The drones are designed to do the same job but far stealthier, and their built-in battery-driven electric motors cost us almost nothing to run. After only ten minutes of assembly-line work, all three dozen drones are lined up on the tail ramp of the Blackfly. Their propulsion package is a little dual-rotor assembly that is as silent as hummingbird wings.

“Units one through thirty-six, function check complete,” Private Rogers announces. “All systems are ‘go’ for launch.”

“Here’s the pattern,” Philbrick says, and brings up the topographical map of the area. Every drone has a hundred-kilometer patrol route mapped out for it that takes the terrain into account. “Figure a hundred minutes for both legs. You want them to go live link or storage mode only?”

In live-link mode, the drones will broadcast their recon data in real time using a low-power encrypted data link. In storage mode, they’ll save the recon data to their internal memory modules and download them to our local TacLink setup when they’ve returned from their flight. Live link gets us earlier warning of threats because it’s immediate, but it does involve transmissions that can potentially give us away. Storage mode means we get the information with a hundred-minute delay, and if a drone goes down, we’ll have a blind spot in our recon coverage.

“Go live link,” I say. “Didn’t spot anything on the threat board on the way in. I don’t think we have to worry about the comms from the drones right now, and I want to know ASAP if something is coming our way.”

“Copy that, sir,” Philbrick replies.

The drones take off one by one, in three-second intervals, whirring off into the clear blue sky like inoffensive little bugs. They don’t have polychromatic plating, but they’re so small that their little gray-and-blue bodies are just about invisible when they’re only barely above the treetops. Not even the hearing augmentation in my helmet is picking up the soft buzz from the tiny double rotors.

“Birds away. Live link up,” Gunny Philbrick says. “Good data on all thirty-six.”

Almost instantly, the TacLink display on my map updates as the drone cameras push out our awareness bubble a few meters per second. Then the drones accelerate to patrol speed, and the bubble grows more quickly, filling blind spots on the tactical map and drawing the surrounding area in high resolution.

“Now I just have to resist the temptation to lie down in this soft grass and take a long nap,” Sergeant Fallon says to me.

The recon drones take almost an hour to reach the maximum range of their patrol patterns. Thirty-six drones mean that each is covering a ten-degree wedge, but that wedge grows wider the further the drones are away from our landing site. I’d have an easier time monitoring the feed from the big screens of the command console inside the drop ship, but I don’t want to go back into the cargo hold where I just spent twenty-four uncomfortable hours. Instead, I walk around outside in the sunshine and keep the tactical display up on my visor overlay. All around me, the SI troopers are still arranged in a circle to cover the drop ship, but with no immediate threat detected by the drones, some have taken the opportunity to take off their helmets and chew on some ration bars.

From twenty-five thousand feet up, the drones can see for hundreds of kilometers with their cameras and passive sensors. The computer does the work of filtering the information and presenting it to me for review every time one of the drones picks up something worth looking at. The first obviously man-made structure pops up on my display from drone 11, which is humming along in its high-altitude patrol loop to our east-southeast. I check the location marked by the computer and immediately rush over to the drop ship to get in front of a bigger display. Sergeant Fallon notices my hurried gait and follows me into the ship.

“Problem?”

“Not yet,” I reply and plug my armor back into the console. “One of the drones spotted something. Hang on.”

I bring the imagery up on the bigger command console screens and zoom in. Even with its 1,000mm lens, the target looks small from five kilometers up, but it’s very clearly a human-built structure, a nearly square concrete building with rounded corners.

“The fuck is that?” Sergeant Fallon says. “Looks like a bunker.”

“Gunny, check the feed from unit 11,” I send to Philbrick. “Get that drone down closer, but keep an eye on the threat display. Anything goes active down there, you go the other way.”

“Copy that,” Philbrick replies. “Stand by. Rogers, over here and fly me that drone for a minute. Bearing one hundred, get her down to five thousand, nice and easy.”

We watch the feed as the drone swings its nose a little further to the north and descends toward the unidentified installation. I can make out more and more detail with every minute, but I still don’t know what I’m looking at, and Sergeant Fallon doesn’t have any idea, either.

“Computer says it’s fifty meters square and ten meters tall,” Philbrick says. “Nothing on infrared or UV.”

“Looks abandoned,” Sergeant Fallon says. “The sides have green spots on them. Like there’s vegetation growing around it.”

“Why would you use that much concrete for a building at the ass end of space and then abandon it? That makes no sense.” I have to think of Lieutenant Dorian’s suggestion that maybe everyone on this colony dropped dead somehow. They couldn’t have gotten a Lanky visit, because then the whole place would be crawling with the bastards, and the atmosphere would be much heavier on the carbon dioxide. If some calamity befell this secret colony, the Lankies had nothing to do with it.

“Holy shit, it’s a terraformer,” Private Rogers says. “Sorry, sir,” she immediately adds.

“What makes you say that, Private?” I ask.

“Look right there.” She uses her light pen to mark the display in front of her and then sends the annotated image through TacLink. “There are exhaust vents. Four on each side. You just can’t see them all that well because they covered the openings up. But you can see where the vent louvers are.” She points to the features she described.

“I can’t really make that shit out,” Sergeant Fallon says.

“Me neither,” I concede. “Private, drop her another thousand feet and do a slow loop around the place.”

“Yes, sir.” The drone’s video feed shakes a little as the drone reorients itself, but the targeting crosshair of the camera array stays dead center on the roof of the unidentified installation.

“I think she’s right,” Philbrick says after a little while. “Those are exhaust vents. Way too big for environmental stuff. And there used to be a power conduit running right here. They took it down, but you can still see the service road. It’s a terraforming unit with a feed link for the fusion plant.”

“It’s tiny,” I say. “I’ve never seen a terraformer that small. The Class III units are the smallest I know, and that down there is half the size of those.”

But as the drone drops into an even lower orbit around the facility, I can see that Private Rogers must be correct. The building is clearly a fusion reactor with atmospheric terraforming vents. It has all the components of a terraformer, only at reduced size.

“Why’d they switch it off?” I wonder.

“What do you do with those when you’re done terraforming?” Sergeant Fallon asks.

“You turn the unit to maintenance mode and keep it around as a fusion reactor for nearby settlements,” Gunny Philbrick says.

“And if you don’t need the fusion power?”

“You mothball it so you don’t have to staff it.”

Sergeant Fallon looks at me and shrugs with a smirk.

“Okay, fine. It’s a terraformer,” I concede. “And it’s deactivated. Mystery solved.”

There’s a red blip on the tactical display, and I turn my attention back to the screen.

“We have something else,” Private Rogers announces. “Drone 34 has some big-time infrared source up ahead.”

I change the screen to the sensor feed from drone 34, which is tooling along at fifteen thousand feet to our northwest. There’s cloud cover between the drone’s cameras and whatever it has spotted, but the infrared sensors in the nose show big, regular patches of thermal energy on the ground, eighty or ninety kilometers ahead of the drone.

“Now that doesn’t look abandoned,” Gunny Philbrick says.

“Get unit 34 below the cloud ceiling so we can get visual,” I say. “And see if we can get a little closer.”

“We let the leash out too far, we may lose the unit on the way back.”

“Do it, Gunny. We can spare a drone. But I want to get eyes on that.”

“Copy that. Get her in closer, Rogers. Just until you’re through the clouds.”

It’s a foregone conclusion that the drone has found a settlement or other big installation on the moon. The infrared emissions aren’t scattered and blotchy, but large and regular, big buildings powered by a lot of energy. But without getting eyes on target, we can’t guess what we have out there just by infrared emissions alone. Thankfully, it doesn’t take the drone very long to descend ten thousand feet and break through the cloud cover.

“Visual contact from unit 34,” Private Rogers says, a little bit of excitement creeping into her voice. “Multiple buildings. Dozens.”

“We have found us a settlement,” Gunny Philbrick says.

The settlement is a lot more obvious than the lone, deactivated terraformer the other drone spotted. We see a tight cluster of colonial architecture, a little town of one-level structures with a few taller buildings here and there. At the edge of the settlement, maybe half a kilometer away from the main cluster, a terraforming unit similar to the one we discovered stands on a little hilltop, and much of the infrared radiation the drone detected is coming from the fusion plant part of the terraformer and the atmospheric vents lining the sides of the unit.