CHAPTER


NINE

Planetfall, Ravenette

The AstroGhost with its thirty-two embarked Force Recon Marines plummeted toward an ocean on Ravenette’s night side. The Marines all wore the version of chameleon uniforms issued specifically to Force Recon, which were even more effective at making their wearers invisible than those worn by infantry Marines and, additionally, had a seriously damping effect on the infrared signature of their wearers. Had they been visible, the thirty-two Marines would have looked bulky, as though they had been bred for life on a high-gravity planet. Part of their extra bulk was due to the packs they all wore on their backs, some packs larger than others. Pockets on the fronts and sides of their chameleons, from shoulder to knee, some on the outside, others on the inside, of their shirts were filled with gear and equipment, water and rations. The pockets and packs of most of the Marines did not carry much by way of weapons and ammunition, the mainstays of infantrymen. The Force Recon Marines were lightly armed; three out of four carried only a knife and a sidearm. In only two of the squads on the AstroGhost was each Marine carrying a blaster in addition to the knife.

The job of most of these Marines wasn’t to fight, it was to gather intelligence. The thinking was, if they carried proper fighting weapons, they might decide to fight rather than silently slip away if they thought they were on the verge of discovery. But if armed only with defensive weapons, they’d be more likely to try harder to evade discovery and capture. Six of the eight squads on this flight were there strictly to gather intelligence, and perhaps commit incidental acts of sabotage. Only two of the squads were there to fight if they found the right targets.

The AstroGhost’s heavy refrigeration and trailing heat-bleeding filaments controlled its visible heat signature to such a degree that an observer would have dismissed its passage as just another minor meteorite’s. When it was low enough, it used acrobatics and drogue chutes to arrest its plunge and went into nape-of-the-sea flight, headed for the west coast of North Continent. It dropped to subsonic speed before crossing the continent’s horizon and commenced a jinking course as soon as it went feet-dry in order to avoid populated areas. The AstroGhost dropped the eight squads in as many spots, each over the horizon from populated areas inland from the Bataan Peninsula on Pohick Bay.

Planetside, Seventy-five Kilometers Northwest of the Bataan Peninsula

Second platoon’s first squad got landed in a clearing on the reverse slope of a medium-size hill in a forest fifty kilometers to the rear of the closest known Coalition position, which was outside a town called Cranston, and two hundred meters from a road leading toward Ashburtonville, at the base of the peninsula. The AstroGhost’s sensors hadn’t picked up any sign of people in the area, but the four Marines quickly moved off the hillside at an angle toward the road—it was still possible that someone nearby had been in a sensor-shadow and invisible to the AstroGhost. They moved almost as silently as they did invisibly.

A hundred and fifty meters from the drop point and still more than a hundred meters from the road, Sergeant Wil Bingh called a halt and the squad went to cover, lying in an outfacing circle covering their entire perimeter. They waited fifteen minutes, with their ears turned all the way up and each of them rotating through his vision screens. They neither saw nor heard sign of people, land vehicles, or aircraft. On Bingh’s signal, they rose to their feet and removed the puddle jumpers from the chameleon cases on their backs. They rolled the cases up and stowed them in their packs, then donned the puddle jumpers—one-man backpack units capable of carrying one fully equipped combat Marine several hundred kilometers at low altitude; they had a range in excess of six hundred kilometers.

Bingh looked for a break in the forest canopy. When he found one, he jumped straight up through it a hundred meters to get a visual fix on the road. No traffic was in sight.

He dropped back down and raised his screens so his men could see his face. “Nothing’s in sight,” he said. “We’re going to follow the road at low altitude for thirty-five klicks, then secure the puddle jumpers and go the rest of the way on foot. I’ll pop up every klick to make sure we still have the road to ourselves. Now turn around.” He lowered his ultraviolet screen and looked at his men’s puddle jumpers. The UV tag on each of them was clearly visible. “All right. Now check me.” He turned his back as his men turned to face him.

“Bright and clear,” Corporal Gin Musica told him.

“Let’s go.”

They rose through the opening in the canopy until they were just above the treetops, then headed for the road. There, they dropped below treetop level and headed southeast, toward Cranston. The Twenty-third Ruspina Rangers were bivouacked at Cranston; first squad’s mission was to gather intelligence on their numbers, armament, and morale.

The road through the trees didn’t travel arrow-straight but rather wound along the landscape, which was why Bingh popped up every klick, to see what was around the next bend or two. He had to be careful where he jumped, as the canopy arched over the road from both sides, frequently completely roofing the roadway. The overhead was dense enough to give them almost complete concealment from the instruments on any enemy aircraft that might be flying surveillance in the area.

The squad covered about twenty kilometers before Bingh saw a landcar approaching. He signaled, and the squad darted fifty meters off the road, ducking below the lowest branches of the trees, and went to ground behind tree trunks. There was no need for concern; the landcar was civilian, carrying what looked like a family unit. Seven kilometers farther…

“Left!” Sergeant Bingh suddenly ordered into the squad circuit—the first word anyone in the squad had spoken over the radio since they’d made planetfall.

As one, the four Marines dropped from the three-meter height they’d been flying to less than a meter between their feet and the ground and swooped under the trees at the left side of the road. By the time they reached the deeper shadows, they all heard what Bingh had heard through his helmet’s amplified aural pickups—the soft whoosh of many vehicles rapidly approaching from their rear.

Fifteen meters in—they didn’t have time to go farther—Bingh ordered them to cut off the puddle jumpers’ power and they dropped the last meter to the ground, then froze in place.

Bingh and Lance Corporal Stanis Wehrli were the only ones facing the road; Corporals Musica and Dana Pricer were looking deeper into the forest—they fell onto their faces so the UV strips on their puddle jumpers weren’t visible from the road. None of the Marines spoke, none of them moved. That many vehicles, moving that rapidly along a little-used country road, could only be a military convoy. The Force Recon Marines couldn’t talk over their helmet radios and they didn’t dare move; they didn’t know what kind of sensors the convoy might have active. The sensors the Marines didn’t have to concern themselves with were visual and infrared; the Force Recon chameleon uniforms rendered them effectively invisible in those parts of the spectrum. This deep in their own rear areas, the approaching Coalition vehicles probably didn’t have anything searching for enemy forces, but there was no need to take chances.

Bingh began recording. He counted: A staff car, bristling with assault guns, led the convoy. An open-sided six-tonne lorry, loaded with infantry, followed close behind. Then another infantry lorry, and another and another, until twenty of them had passed. Each of them appeared to have more than thirty soldiers crammed into it—an entire battalion. A battery of self-propelled artillery followed the lorries. A vehicle of a type Bingh didn’t recognize brought up the rear of the convoy.

Bingh leaned close to Wehrli and touched helmets with him when the convoy disappeared from view. “Any idea what that thing was?” he asked.

“Not a clue,” Wehrli answered. He sounded a bit awed by the Coalition vehicle.

The vehicle was about the size of a self-propelled artillery piece, but had protuberances on all sides, and what looked like a rack of antiaircraft rockets on top. Some of the protuberances were obviously barrels for projectile weapons, but the purposes of the rest were less obvious. Bingh suspected they were energy weapons of some sort, though they didn’t look like any he had ever seen before.

Bingh turned about and looked for Musica and Pricer. Standing, he was able to spot the UV markers on their puddle jumpers. “On your feet,” he said in the open. “Look at this,” he told them when they stood, and transmitted an image of the last vehicle in the convoy.

“What the hell is that?” Musica asked after looking at the image on his heads-up display.

“I was hoping you could tell me. Pricer?”

“I never saw anything like it, either.”

“Damn,” Bingh muttered. Marine Force Recon was supposed to be up-to-date on all weapons and weapons systems in Human Space. Indeed, Force Recon Marines routinely oriented on weapons and weapons systems they might encounter on reconnaissance and raid missions, so they could use them if necessary. It was the first time Bingh had encountered a completely unfamiliar weapon system. What did the convoy have to do with the Twenty-third Ruspina Rangers? Was that weapon system somehow connected to them?

He wondered what other surprises his squad might encounter. He didn’t like surprises; surprises could kill Marines.

“I’m going to uplink,” he said out loud. “Stand alert.” His men moved into an outward-facing triangle and lowered themselves to one knee. Bingh looked for the tallest tree in the immediate vicinity, stood under it, and used his puddle jumper to rise until the branches came too close together for him to continue comfortably. Then he grabbed hold and climbed.

The trunk and branches of the forest giant remained sturdy enough to support him until he was nearly at the canopy’s top. He checked the timeline; the Admiral Stoloff should have reached orbit and been below the horizon on its second orbit, but should come into view in a little more than fifteen minutes. He used part of the time to prepare a message, including his squad’s location and the recording he’d made of the convoy. He appended a carefully worded request that company headquarters downlink to him any data they had on the strange vehicle. A weapon system that he didn’t recognize bothered him more than he wanted to admit.

When fifteen minutes had passed, he used his Universal Positionator Up-Downlink, Mark IV—UPUD—to scan the horizon. He found the Admiral Stoloff in a few minutes, locked on it, and sent his message in a half-second burst. Then he settled back to wait for a reply. It came sooner than he expected:

“Received and being analyzed. Continue mission.”

Bingh stared at the reply for a long moment. “Being analyzed,” it said. That meant that HQ didn’t know what the thing was—it was going to be up to the squads on the ground to find out. He climbed back down to where he could use the puddle jumper and gave his men the news. They didn’t like it any better than he did.

They continued cautiously along the road.

One Hundred Kilometers Due West of the Bataan Peninsula

Second platoon’s third squad was inserted in a shallow valley one ridgeline away from a broad expanse of grain fields that was checkerboarded by farm roads. It was an area of minimal immediate military concern except for one detail—sensor readings on board the heavy cruiser CNSS Kiowa indicated the presence of an underground complex on the far side of the wheat fields. Third squad’s initial mission was to determine whether that subterranean complex was military or civilian.

Just like first squad, third squad scrambled away from its drop point as soon as it was on the ground, heading at an oblique angle up the ridgeline that separated it from the grain fields. The Marines moved more quickly and silently than first squad had—they weren’t encumbered with puddle jumpers.

Two hundred meters from where they were dropped, they stopped and went prone in a circle, each Marine facing a different direction, their boots touching in the middle. They checked to make sure their ears were turned up all the way and rotated their screens through infrared, magnifier, and light-gatherer. Sergeant Him Kindy activated his motion detector and had it show on his heads-up display; Corporal Nomonon turned on his scent detector and checked that its alert would sound in his ear.

After a half hour of watching, listening, and sensing without detecting sign of anybody but themselves in the vicinity of their insertion point, Kindy signaled the squad to move out. Lance Corporal Hans Ellis led, followed by Kindy. Corporal Ryn Jaschke brought up the rear behind Nomonon. They continued on the same diagonal, pausing frequently to watch, listen, and sense for sign of anybody. Their movement was slow, each step deliberate, to avoid leaving prints, broken twigs, or bent leaves that could signal their passage to a tracker.

The ridge wasn’t high, but their angle of climb was so shallow that it took close to two hours for them to reach the top, two kilometers from where they’d first waited after being inserted into the valley.

When they were still heads-down below the top of the ridgeline, Kindy stopped the squad and they went into the positions they’d hold, barring enemy action, for the next several hours. Kindy and Jaschke belly-crawled up the last few meters to where they could see across the grain fields. Ellis took a position five meters downslope and ahead of them, facing downslope and in the direction in which they’d moved. Nomonon was similarly positioned on the other side of Kindy and Jaschke, facing back and down.

The fields were more than ten kilometers wide. Machines trundled through them, fertilizing or weeding, Kindy didn’t know which, but thought possibly both. Lorries moved purposely along the roads; they seemed to leave from an indistinct cluster of buildings and silos on the far side of the fields and return to it. None gave any appearance of interest in the ridgeline. The roads didn’t appear to be paved, but they must somehow have been stabilized because the moving lorries didn’t raise dust. Misters generated small fog banks over the growing crops, watering them.

The entrance to the suspected underground complex was thought to be on the far side of the fields, inside or adjacent to the cluster of buildings and silos. But at this distance, Kindy couldn’t make out any detail, even with his four-power magnifier screen in place. From so far away, his infra screen couldn’t give him any useful information either, not even when combined with the magnifier. Beyond the complex, the landscape was flat, covered with low-lying brush and occasional trees. Kindy suspected that the cultivated land had looked exactly like that before it was broken for farming.

Kindy made sure he was deep in the shadows of the bush he was snugged under and reached into an inside pocket of his shirt for his ocular. Carefully, slowly, so the movement wouldn’t draw attention, he raised his helmet screens and lifted the ocular to his eyes. He adjusted it to thirty power and began examining the structures on the far side of the fields.

Numerous barns popped into clear view, as did three buildings that looked like processing plants. A long row of silos stood idle, waiting for the harvest. One sprawling building looked to be an administrative headquarters, another a dining hall capable of feeding more people than were visible in the fields and the complex. Two or three others might have been living quarters. People walked about casually; they all had destinations, but there was no sense of urgency in their movements. A few people rode in carts or small lorries. Like the walkers, they seemed in no hurry to get where they were going. The ground in the complex wasn’t stabilized, so small dust clouds rose in the wakes of the carts and lorries. An athletic field with bleachers on one side lay at one end of the complex. There were other open areas within the confines of the complex.

The complex spread for about a kilometer and a half along the fields and several hundred meters beyond them. Fencing of some sort bordered the complex on the three sides away from the fields. Two gates with gatehouses were open in the far side. From the gates, roads ran arrow-straight at angles from each other into the distance. The gatehouses did not appear to be occupied. A roadway with no obvious reason for being ran around the outside of the fence.

While Kindy scanned the complex, his ocular recorded everything he looked at and stored the data on a crystal; the ridgetop was high enough for him to see the full shapes of the buildings. On command, the ocular could project an overhead view of what he saw to his HUD, or onto a flat surface for study by the squad.

After viewing and recording the built-up areas, Kindy turned his attention to the open areas. He hadn’t seen a structure that looked like the entrance to the underground, though one of the barns might have hidden such. It was also possible that the entrance was camouflaged and in the open. He scanned the open areas even more intently than he had the built-up, paying particular attention to the pattern of road usage as shown by tracks in the dirt.

An hour of close study didn’t reveal anything out of the ordinary that might indicate the presence of a camouflaged entrance to the underground, even when he displayed an overhead view on his HUD.

Kindy shifted his attention to the land to the left of the complex. Intense study revealed no roads or pathways there other than the few he had already noted. His examination of the land to the right was just as fruitless. So was the landscape beyond the complex.

He lowered the oculars and, after closing his chameleon screen, rested the chin of his helmet on his hands. Surveillance from the orbiting Kiowa had identified a probable underground complex here. Unless the AstroGhost had inserted his squad in the wrong location, there was no sign of such a complex from the ground.

The AstroGhost hadn’t inserted third squad in the wrong place, Kindy knew that. The squad was here to determine whether the underground complex was military or civilian. Its entrance was concealed, which strongly indicated whatever was underground was military rather than civilian. But he had no proof of that. He needed proof.

Sergeant Kindy prepared a preliminary report to beam up to the Kiowa when Commander Obannion transferred his headquarters to Task Force 79’s flagship.