March Upcountry

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"Oh, joy."

Pahner tapped the monitor control, but the picture didn't get any better. Not that there was anything wrong with the sensors or their readouts.

For the last three days the shuttles had been on a pursuit arc headed to overtake the planet from behind. The port was on a small continent or a large island, depending on how one chose to look at it, and their flight plan had been carefully calculated to bring them down just on the far side of the local ocean. That would have put them within a thousand klicks of their objective, and the Mardukans were supposed to have seafaring capability, so most of the trip could be accomplished on shipboard. All they'd have to do would be to hire a ship or ships to carry them across.

It had been, Pahner admitted modestly, a neat and tidy plan. The only real drawback had been that it pushed the parameters of the shuttles' range envelope. The deep-space burns required to put them on the proper intercept course for the planet had consumed so much of their total fuel that they had just enough left to complete their approach and land.

Unfortunately, there was a ship in orbit above the port.

She was powered down, or DeGlopper would have detected her, but she was probably the carrier for the parasite cruisers. And whoever she was, parked in that position, she would be able to detect and track the shuttles' reentry unless they landed, literally, on the far side of the planet.

The good news was that the second Saint cruiser obviously hadn't realized the shuttles had escaped—or, at least, hadn't realized in time to alert her carrier. If she had, the carrier would have moved to watch the side of the planet which the port's sensors couldn't cover in order to prevent the shuttles from sneaking in. The bad news was that the carrier's mere presence, and the diversion that would force upon them, would add some ten thousand kilometers to their dirtside journey.

And, of course, that they wouldn't have enough fuel for the landing, anyway.

"Oh, this is bad," Roger said, looking over the captain's shoulder. "Very, very bad."

"Yes, Your Highness," Pahner said with immense restraint. "It is."

He and the prince had been at close quarters for three days, and neither was in the best mood.

"What are we going to do?" Roger asked, and that faint edge of whine was back in his voice.

Pahner was spared the necessity of an immediate response by the attention chime of the communicator. He managed not to let his relief at the interruption show as he hit the button that acknowledged the com request. Rather than answer immediately, however, he switched the system to holo-mode and waited patiently. It wasn't a long wait, and he smiled thinly at the series of holograms which soon hovered in the compartment.

"I take it that you've all noticed our friend," he said dryly once his audience—all three lieutenants, all four pilots, Sergeant Major Kosutic, and Eleanora O'Casey—was complete.

"Oh, yeah," Warrant Bann said. "The planned IP is out, and so are aborts one and two."

"We should have had a plan in place for this!" Chief Warrant Officer Dobrescu snapped. The pilot of Shuttle Four looked at Pahner as if this were all his fault. Which, in a way, it was.

"That's true enough," Bann said, "but the fact is that we never did have the fuel for a conventional powered landing, no matter where we set down. We needed that atmospheric braking even to hit the prime site."

"Which site is completely out of the question with that damned carrier sitting there," Pahner pointed out. It was, he decided, almost certainly the most unnecessary observation he'd ever made, but he made himself continue with the thoroughly unpalatable corollary. "We'll have to land in the backlands, instead."

"We can't," Dobrescu said. "You can't land one of these things in a jungle unpowered!"

"What about these white patches?" Roger asked, and Pahner and all of the holograms turned to look at him as he tapped the limited chart he'd been feverishly reviewing. The map on the handheld pad had been prepared from a cursory spatial survey and had virtually no detail, but certain features stood out, and he tapped the image again.

"I don't know what they are," Pahner said. He took the pad and gazed thoughtfully at the irregularly shaped patches in a mountainous region on the far side of the planet from the port. "Whatever they are, they aren't created structures; they're too big for that."

He started to say that they wouldn't help, then stopped. They weren't jungle or water or mountain, and that was about all the planet had to offer. So what were they?

By now others were studying their pads.

"I think..." Lieutenant Gulyas began, then stopped.

"You think what?" Warrant Bann asked. He too was drawn to the white patches.

"They're one of two things," Gulyas said. "I can't tell if they're above or below sea level, but if they're low enough, I think they might be dry lakebeds."

"Dry lakebeds on a jungle world," Dobrescu snorted. "That's rich. And very convenient if they are. But if we aim for them and they're not, we're dead."

"Well," Bann replied, "a planet is a damned big place, Chief. There almost have to be dry lakebeds on it somewhere, and we're dead anyway if the carrier sees us or we auger into a mountainside. Might as well try the possible lakebeds and hope."

"I agree with Lieutenant Gulyas," Roger said. "That's why I pointed them out. This looks like the sort of folded mountain formation where you'd get them. If the mountains folded around them and cut off their water sources, that would leave dry lakebeds." He scanned across the rest of the map. "And there are others, closer to the port. See? It's not just here."

"But the rest of the world is swamps, Your Highness," Dobrescu pointed out. "You need desert terrain for dry lakes, and why would there be desert only there?"

"I'd say that whole mountain range is probably arid," Pahner said. "The surface color is brown, not green. And there are other arid regions—they're just few and far between. So there's a good chance these really are dry lakes."

He gazed at the pad a moment longer, then set it aside and looked back at the pilots.

"Whether we're in agreement or not, the possibility that they're lakebeds is our only way out. So begin recalculating for an extended burn to slow us and a sharp descent behind the planet for a dead stick landing."

Dobrescu opened his mouth to protest, but Pahner held up his hand.

"Unless there's an alternative plan, that's what we're going to do. Do you have an alternative?"

"No, Sir," Dobrescu replied after a long moment. "But, with all due respect, I don't like the idea of risking His Highness' safety on a guess."

"Neither do I. But that's exactly what we're going to do. And the good news is, that we're going to be risking the rest of our lives right along with his. So if it doesn't work, none of us will have to explain it to Her Majesty."

After they'd hit zero G and the likelihood of being shot out of space by the cruiser had passed, the troops had floated around the troop bay, lacing into their low-grav hammocks and chilling out. Three days on the shuttle without a damned thing they had to do but sleep were on the order of heaven to most of the experienced Marines. But as they neared the planet and landing, the hammocks and loose gear were secured, and the troops buckled down and put on their mission faces. It had been a nice little interlude, and everyone felt fairly refreshed.

Of course, there were still a few small problems to deal with.

"Hold on a second," Julian said as the shuttle began to skip through the outermost reaches of atmosphere. "Are you trying to tell me that they think there's a landing zone?"

"More or less." Despreaux smiled. "It looks like there is, but, you know, we don't exactly have the best maps in the galaxy."

"Oh, this is truly good," Julian said, slamming his helmet into place while the assault shuttle began to shake and shudder. "Wrrflmgdf," he continued, as the helmet muffled his voice.

"What was that?" Despreaux held a hand up to her ear as she reached for her own headcover. "I think I missed it."

"What I said was," Julian cut in his suit speaker to tell her, "this is truly fucking good!"

"What's the problem?" Despreaux settled her helmet and brought her own speakers online. "Just another day in the Marines."

"This is the sort of shit I wrangled my way into the Regiment to avoid," Julian snarled, wiggling deeper into the enveloping memory plastic of his cocoon as the shuttle hit another bump. "If I wanted to make lousy drops on hostile planets under insane commanders I could've stayed with Sixth Fleet."

Despreaux laughed.

"Oh, Zeus, that's rich! You were in the Sixth?"

"Yep, under Admiral Helmut, Dark Lord of the Sixth." He shook his head in memory. "Now there was a character. Kill you as soon as look at you."

Despreaux smiled, and her eyes crinkled as the shuttle gave another lurch. "You know you love it."

"Like hell!" Julian shouted as the roar of reentry filled the compartment and began to grow. He worked his tongue at a bit of ration caught between his teeth for a moment, and looked around quizzically.

"Is it just me, or do we seem to be coming in a little faster than usual?"

"We're too steep!" Bann shouted, and his hand cocked, ready to override the automated reentry system if the computer got confused.

"Stay on profile," Dobrescu said calmly. "We're in the pipe. It's just a shaky pipe, is all."

"We're exceeding parameters!" Bann snapped. Shuttle Four felt as if it were shuddering apart, and there was zero maneuver fuel left. All the pilot could do was hang on and hope she stayed together. "I've got overheating on all surfaces, and stress warnings on the wings!"

"We are exceeding the manual numbers," Dobrescu admitted as his toot flashed a series of numbers across his vision. Every system was in the yellow, but he'd performed over two thousand drops in training and combat, and had a far better feel for the real, as opposed to the specified, capabilities of the rugged drop shuttles than whatever dweeb had written the manual. "The computer doesn't like that, but the numbers are conservative. We'll be fine."

"This is insane!"

"Hey, you're the one who said 'go for the lakebeds'!" Dobrescu chuckled nastily. Then shrugged. "Would you rather be target practice for that carrier?" he asked in a milder tone. There was no answer. "Then shut up and hang on."

The shuttles flashed across the eastern ocean at five times the speed of sound, and the thunder of their crossing hammered the uncaring waves. Their speed dropped steadily, and the outer barrier range of mountains—the upthrust giants that turned the region beyond into a desiccated wasteland—reared before them. They swung out their wings, clawing now for enough speed and lift to make the tiny dots of their possible landing areas, and the faces of their pilots were grim and taut.

The craft were heavily laden, and even with their wings swept forward for maximum lift, their greatest danger now was that they would simply fall out of the sky. They had to retain altitude to cross the soaring ranges, yet maintain a tightly calculated flight path to their hoped-for landing areas, and the final descent would be steep and tricky.

Shuttle Four cleared the final ridge by barely nine meters, and Warrant Officer Bann let out a whoop.

"Yeeha! That's a dry lake if I've ever seen one!"

The glittering white salt bed reflected the intense G-9 sun like a mirror. The pilots' helmet visors darkened automatically, and their eyes swept back and forth over the glowing instrument readouts projected onto their visor heads-up displays.

The dangers of landing on salt lakes were as old as flight. The flat, white expanses made perfect airports but for one thing: perspective. With nothing to give a feeling of depth, a pilot trying to land visually was unable to determine whether he was going to land or just dig a big, nasty hole. The answer, of course, was technology, and the shuttle pilots pulled in their heads like turtles and shut out everything but their instruments. Radar and lidar range finders measured airspeed, velocity over ground, flight-angle, and all the other myriad variables that made the difference between a landing and a fireball and pronounced them correct. Nonetheless, each pilot continued to monitor his systems, hoping that no further demons would rear their ugly heads at the last moment and snatch defeat from victory.

Chief Warrant Dobrescu checked his instruments, studied the computer-calculated glide path on his HUD, and shook his head. They were actually doing it. He'd given up on performing any sort of decent landing when they picked up the Saint carrier; now it seemed that the entire company might actually make it to the ground intact.

Then the hard part would start.