Terms of Enlistment

Chapter 20

If the combat landings in the TA were a high-speed descent in an express elevator, the ride into Willoughby’s atmosphere from high orbit is like a rocket-assisted free fall down the elevator shaft. As we enter the upper layers of the planet’s atmosphere, Halley pulls up the nose to expose the ceramic belly armor of the Wasp to the friction heat generated by our high-speed entry. For a good ten minutes, I can’t see anything on the other side of the cockpit window but superheated gases streaming past in bright flares. Halley makes control inputs on her stick and throttle to keep the ship on the right angle and trajectory, but the results of her corrections are too subtle for be to feel. To me, it feels like we’re just falling into the atmosphere belly-first, and only Halley’s calm and focused demeanor keeps me from full-blown panic. When the fireworks outside the cockpit finally subside, the blackness of space has given way to the bright, pale blue of a clear sky.

“Altitude one hundred thousand,” Halley announces, more to herself than for my benefit.

“Ever done this all by yourself?” I ask.

“Not without Lieutenant Rickman riding shotgun in the left seat. Relax, Andrew. I know what I’m doing here.”

“Never doubted it,” I say, and claw the molded armrests of my seat as she increases thrust and pulls the Wasp into a banking turn.

“They got some shitty weather down there,” Halley says when we pass through twenty thousand feet. “All I see is storms. I thought this place was terraformed.”

I look outside at the top of the cloud cover, a roiling mass of gray and black that extends from one end of the horizon to the other.

“Just because it’s terraformed doesn’t mean it’s like Earth in springtime,” I say, remembering Sergeant Fallon’s words back at the Medical Center.

“Well, if this is what it looks like after they had the atmo exchangers running for a decade, I don’t want to know what it looked like when the survey ship got here. Hang on, this is going to be a bit bumpy.”

Halley has a gift for understatement. As we enter the cloud cover above Willoughby’s surface, the ship gets whipped around like a plastic bag on a wind-swept sidewalk. We’re in the clouds just a few moments before rain starts hammering the thick glass of the cockpit, fat drops that sound like heavy-caliber small arms fire hitting the window panels. I shoot Halley a worried glance, but she’s focused on her instruments and flight controls. There’s nothing I can do to help get us down on the ground in one piece, so I do my best to merge with the thin padding on my armored seat.

“This weather is fucked up,” Halley says after a while. “We’re at five thousand, and it’s twenty-five degrees celsius out there. It’s like fucking Florida in late spring.”

“Too warm?”

“For this rock? Hell, yes. Weather briefing yesterday said they’re just above freezing this time of year.”

We finally break out of the cloud cover over muddy brown terrain that looks entirely too close for comfort. Halley levels out the ship and banks slightly to the right to get a good look at the planet surface below.

“Wow, that mess went almost all the way down,” she says. “We’re fifteen hundred feet above the deck.”

“Versailles personnel, this is Stinger Six-Two,” Halley broadcasts. “I’m a hundred and ten klicks out from your position. ETA five minutes. Can you find me a nice flat spot and pop some IR smokers?”

“Copy, Six-Two,” a voice replies on the emergency channel. “Uh, negative on the smokers. We have hostiles in the neighborhood. Just home in on the pod and set down as close as you can. And have that ramp down, ‘cause we need to evac in a hurry.”

“Six-Two, copy,” Halley replies, and then gives me a bewildered look.

“Hostiles? What the hell is he talking about? My threat board is blank.”

“Native wildlife?” I offer, and Halley shakes her head.

“Ain’t nothing living down there except what came in on the colony ship, except for some algae.”

“Chinese or Russians? Think they have troops on the ground?”

“I don’t fucking know, Andrew,” Halley replies. “All I know is that I wish we actually had some ordnance on those pylons, ‘cause if we bump into someone who needs shooting, all we can do is flip ‘em the bird.”

The escape pod looks like a projectile from a giant cannon. It’s lying on its side on a gently sloping hillside, lines from the retardation parachute draped all over it like bright orange vines. Halley makes a low pass over the site, and I can see several people down by the pod, waving at us with urgent gestures.

“Well, that looks flat enough,” she says. “Hang on, I’m putting down in that spot over there.”

We coast in at a low angle and touch down on the surface less than a hundred yards from the stranded escape pod. As soon as the Wasp has come to a rest on all three skids, Halley cuts the throttle and punches a button on her console. Behind us, I hear the familiar whine of an opening cargo hatch. A few moments later, we hear several pairs of boots running up the ramp and into the cargo bay.

“Don’t bother unstrapping, pilot,” an out-of-breath voice says over the emergency channel. “You get airborne and close that hatch as soon as I say, you hear?”

“Copy that,” Halley replies.

There’s more tromping behind us as more crewmembers thunder up the cargo ramp.

“Dustoff,” the out-of-breath voice shouts into the comms. “Get us the hell off the ground, now.”

Halley hits the cargo door switch with her palm, seizes the stick and throttle again, and gooses the engines. “Hang on to something back there,” she shouts into the intercom, and pulls the Wasp into a vertical climb. She swings the tail of the ship around and points the nose back the way we came. Then we pick up speed again and climb back into the cloud cover. Not even thirty seconds have elapsed since our ship’s skids touched down on the planet’s surface.

Back in the cargo hold, the XO claims the jump seat of the crew chief and plugs himself into the ship’s intercom circuit. The armored hatch between the cockpit and the cargo hold is open, and I can see crew members opening the arms locker and distributing small arms, even though the drop ship is once again getting bounced around by turbulence.

“Talk to me, sir,” Halley says. “What’s going on down there?”

“We have a non-native species down there, that’s what,” the XO replies.

Halley and I share an incredulous look. The spacefaring nations of Earth have close to a hundred colony planets and moons as far out as Zeta Reticuli, and nobody has ever encountered any life on those that could be observed without a microscope.

“Non-native species?” Halley repeats. “What, like fucking aliens?”

“Yes, like fucking aliens,” the XO says. “Unless the colonists brought along livestock that’s eighty fucking feet tall. Now find us some better weather, and stay the hell away from the ground, you copy?”

Halley takes the ship back up through the clouds. The ride up isn’t quite as bone-jarring as the descent had been, but I still breathe a sigh of relief when we break through the cloud ceiling, and the skies are blue once more.

“We’re clear of the chop,” Halley tells the XO over the intercom. “Where do you want me to take this thing? I have forty-five minutes of fuel left.”

Behind us, Commander Campbell unbuckles from the crew chief’s jump seat, and walks up to the cockpit, where he crouches between our high-backed pilot seats.

“Ensign, how far is the nearest colony settlement from our current datum?” he asks Halley. She checks her nav screen and shrugs her shoulders.

“I have no idea, sir. This is the spare bird, remember? All the databanks are blank. We didn’t get to upload any nav data before we left. I can get a satellite fix and tell you our coordinates, but I have nothing else on my map.”

“I can probably pull that off the admin deck,” I say. The Commander looks at me, and I raise the eye shield of my flight helmet to show my face.

“Mister Grayson,” he says. “Glad to see you made it off the ship. Get back here and fire up your toy, please.”

“Aye-aye, sir.” I unbuckle my seat harness and climb over the armored sidewall of my chair.

“Will do, sir,” Halley replies.

I am still in a state of shocked disbelief. Since the invention of the Alcubierre drive, we’ve been expanding into other star systems, but nobody’s ever picked up so much as a stray radio signal from another civilization. I remember the ongoing debates on the science channels in school, the Rare Earthers arguing that we’re probably the only sentient species in the galaxy, and the Saganites and Copernicans arguing that the universe is probably chock full of spacefaring species like ourselves. Until now, that particular discussion wasn’t settled. We’re only forty-two light years from home, which means that we’re still playing in our front yard, astronomically speaking. If we’ve already bumped into another species capable of space travel, the galaxy must be lousy with them.

“What do they look like?” I ask the XO. “Are they hostile?”

“Are they hostile? Shit, I hope not. The one we saw was fucking huge. Passed our pod in the rain, a few hundred yards off. Shook the fucking ground.”

“I’m picking up beacons from two more pods,” Halley says from the right seat. “They’re both down in the soup. You guys got scattered all over this rock.”

“Can you get there with the fuel you have?” the XO asks her. Halley considers his question briefly and shrugs.

“Sure, but we won’t be flying anywhere else. One’s three hundred fifty klicks east, the other’s three hundred northwest. Plus, I won’t be able to see shit all the way down.”

“Forget it, then,” the XO says. “Let’s just take a look at the map, and we’ll try to get them on the comms later.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Halley replies.

There are three of the Versailles’ officers in the cargo bay, all junior watch officers from CIC, and four anxious-looking Marines in fatigues.

“Where’s the skipper, sir? Wasn’t he in CIC when we got hit?”

“The skipper took a different pod,” Lieutenant Commander Campbell replies. “As per regs. One of the pods burns up or crashes, it won’t take out both senior officers at once. Now crack that thing open, and let’s see if we can figure out where the hell we are.”

My admin deck holds the other half of the location puzzle. I can bring up the complete data set for Willoughby, including the locations of every structure on the planet, and the trajectories of every satellite in orbit, but I have no way of telling where we are.

“Halley, can you give me a nav fix?” I ask her over the intercom.

“Sure thing. Stand by.”

She consults her screen, and then rattles off a string of coordinates. I plug the numbers into the satellite map of Willoughby, and my admin deck pinpoints our position with a neat crosshair that looks disturbingly like an aiming reticle.

“Here we are,” I say to the XO, and turn the screen toward him. He studies the display for a few moments, and frowns.

“Figures. We’re in the wrong fucking place. Main settlement’s on the other hemisphere.”

He hands the admin deck back to me, and rubs the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger.

“Well, that’s just special. Our ride’s got no ordnance and almost no fuel, we’re three thousand klicks from the only refueller on this rock, and the place is under new management, from the looks of it.”

I pan and zoom the satellite map to check the radius Halley estimated earlier as the maximum range of the ship with the remaining fuel. We’re on a peninsula that’s hundreds of miles long and wide, and most of it is absolutely barren, but there’s a base marker directly south of us. I check the range to find that it’s less than two hundred miles away.

“Here’s something, but I have no idea what that map symbol means.”

I fold the display over, and hand the deck to the Commander. He looks at the map for a moment, and pokes a finger at the symbol.

“That’s one of the terraforming units. Big-ass atmospheric exchanger, with a fusion reactor underneath.”

“They got any food and water?”

“Yes,” he says. “They have maintenance crews on site. Chow, hot water, showers, and cots to sleep on. They even have comms gear. Hell, they may even have fuel. Good find, Mister Grayson.”

He gives the admin deck back to me, and claps into his hands.

“We found a rest stop, people. Let’s go see if anyone’s home.”

The terraforming station is a huge, square building that looks like the factory box for a fleet frigate. It’s made of unpainted concrete that has weathered a lot since the terraforming network was set up over a decade ago. There are rows of smaller box-shaped structures all along the long edges of the main building, each of them crowned by giant, square exhaust nozzles that look large enough to land a drop ship in them with room to spare.

“Ugly, ain’t it?” Commander Campbell says behind us, giving voice to my thoughts. “Class Three atmospheric exchanger. They have sixty-three more of those on this rock. Takes a lot of money to terraform a planet like this.”

I look at the ugly, hulking mountain of concrete below us as Halley circles the complex at low altitude, and try to imagine over five dozen of these things lined up side by side. The sheer material cost of that network must be staggering, but it’s probably dwarfed by the amount of money it took to truck the machinery inside those atmospheric exchangers across forty light years of space. Suddenly, I understand why the Commonwealth is always short on cash, and why the welfare cities only get protein patties and recycled shit to eat.

“Anyone awake down there, keep your heads low. Navy flight Stinger Six-Two is coming in for a landing,” Halley broadcasts.

There’s a cluster of prefabricated buildings at one end of the massive main structure, and a gravel landing pad marked crudely with white spray paint. We descend over the landing spot, Halley putting the seventy-ton war machine down on the gravel so gently that I can’t even feel the skids touching the ground. The buildings of the outpost are undamaged, and I can see lights inside. Halley cuts the throttle and hits the switch for the rear hatch with the outside of her fist. Then she reaches overhead and throws a few important-looking switches, and the engines shut down with a prolonged whining sound.

“Let’s see who’s home,” she says.

Behind us, the Marines file out of the cargo bay, weapons at the ready. The Navy officers follow, looking a lot less martial in their work uniforms.

“Well, we might as well join in,” Halley says to me. “Unless they have a few tons of drop ship juice stashed away somewhere, this bird’s staying put.”

We unbuckle our seat harnesses and take off our flight helmets. Halley leaves hers on her seat, and I follow suit. On the way out of the cockpit, she pauses for a moment and pats the frame of the bulkhead briefly, as if she’s thanking a loyal steed for getting her to her destination safely.

I open the hatch to the weapons locker and take a rifle off the rack. Halley steps in next to me and takes a rifle as well. She checks the chamber of her weapon, opens a munitions drawer, and starts handing me magazines.

“You remember how to use one of those, don’t you?” I say, and she flips me the bird without pausing her task. I stuff a magazine into each of my leg pockets, and insert another one into the rifle. Being armed with a proper battle rifle again gives me a small bit of comfort.

With Halley charging her rifle next to me, I have a sudden flash of deja vu, remembering the times before Urban Combat Training back in Basic, when we got ready to do mock battles against each other, like a game of tag with armor and pretend rifles. Every piece of gear in this arms locker is designed for humans in battle armor to fight other humans in battle armor, and it occurs to me that we’re not prepared to stick our collective toes into the galaxy beyond our own little backwater star system.

“Eighty feet tall,” Halley mutters next to me as she’s slipping a load-bearing harness over her flight suit. “Makes you wish those MARS rockets came with nuclear warheads, doesn’t it?”

By the time we leave the drop ship to join the rest of the crew, there’s a welcoming committee waiting for us outside. A full squad of Marines has come out of one of the buildings to greet us. They’re all in partial armor, chest and leg plates but no helmets or web gear, evidence that our arrival has taken them by surprise. As Halley and I walk up to join the group, the leader of the Marine squad lowers his rifle and salutes our XO.

“Sergeant Becker, Sir. We’re the garrison squad. Glad to see the Navy’s finally in town.”

“Commander Campbell, NACS Versailles. Care to fill me in on what the hell is going on here on this rock, Sergeant?”

The sergeant exchanges unsure glances with his squad.

“We were hoping you’d tell us, sir. We haven’t heard anything from Willoughby City in almost a month.”

The terraforming station is staffed by a squad of Marines and twelve civilian colony techs. Even with our five Navy officers and four Versailles Marines added, everyone on the facility fits into the station’s mess hall with room to spare. Commander Campbell is the highest-ranking officer of the group by far, and he slips into his XO function seamlessly.

“You’ve had no comms with the main settlement in over three weeks?” he asks.

“No, sir. One morning, we were talking to them, swapping status reports—and then the feed dropped, just like that. We have run diagnostics on all the gear all the way up to the satellite uplink. It’s all working as it should.”

“Sergeant Becker,” the XO says.

“Sir?”

“Take your Marines and mine, and give me a perimeter guard around this place. Corporal Harrison is going to tell you what to look for. You see anything at all coming this way, you ring the alarm.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” Sergeant Becker says. “You heard the man. Let’s get busy, Marines.”

The Marines gather their weapons and file out of the room.

“What’s going on, Commander?” one of the civilians asks the XO. “Are we under attack by the SRA?”

“Well,” he replies, “the good news is that there’s not a single SRA unit within five light years of this place, as far as we know.”

“I’m guessing there’s bad news, too,” the civilian says. “Since you just sent out all the Marines to stand guard outside.”

“Oh, you have no idea,” Commander Campbell replies.

The revelation that humanity just encountered its first alien species shocks the techs visibly, but they seem rather more upset about discovering that we’re not here to evacuate them to a waiting Navy fleet unit, and that the ship that brought us here is probably dispersed all over the continent by now.

“Well, that caps a lousy month,” the supervisor of the station says after the XO finishes briefing the civilians on the events since we dropped out of the Alcubierre chute a few hours ago.

“Tell me about it,” the XO chuckles.

“Ever since we lost contact with Willoughby City, the weather’s gone all weird on us. We’ve been keeping tabs on the atmospheric data ever since we set up shop in this place, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“We noticed it’s awfully warm out there,” Halley says. “I thought this place was just above freezing right now.”

“We’ve been at five degrees Celsius this time of year for the last five years running, ever since the terraforming team handed us the keys,” the supervisor says. “Right now, it’s twenty degrees above normal, and the temperature has gone up by five degrees per week for three weeks now.”

“There’s a bitch of a storm system a few hundred klicks south of here,” Halley says. “Eighty-knot winds, and rain from ten thousand feet all the way down to the deck.”

“We got more rainfall just last week than we got in the three months before that. Lots of storms. But let me show you something a little more troubling.”

He opens the portable data terminal he had been carrying in his hand, and sits down at one of the mess tables. The XO and the junior officers gather behind him to get a look at the screen.

“We have all the terraforming stations on this planet networked, so we can share data and keep things in sync. Not too long after we lost contact with Willoughby City, the stations have been dropping out of the network. We synchronize our data over the satellite every morning and evening, and right now we only have forty-nine live nodes left. Every day, another station or two drops off the network. But that’s not even the really bad news.”

He types away at the keypad briefly and points to the display.

“When they turned over the place to colonize, the atmosphere was pretty close to Earth’s own. We were at eighty point three percent nitrogen, eighteen percent oxygen, point eight percent argon, and one hundredth of a percent of carbon dioxide.”

He calls up another screen, and points at a data table.

“Ever since we’ve lost contact with Central, the oxygen content of the atmosphere has dropped, and the carbon dioxide level has increased. Right now, we’re at fifteen percent oxygen, seventy-three percent nitrogen, and three percent carbon dioxide. The oxygen level is dropping by a percent every week, and the carbon dioxide is increasing by a percent. At this rate, we’ll have a hard time breathing in a few weeks. With the temperature increase thrown in, you’re looking at reversal of ten years of terraforming in a month. Even with our terraformers turning off one by one, the atmosphere shouldn’t flip like that. All these stations are in maintenance mode now, and the terraforming is pretty much done. Was pretty much done,” he corrects himself.

“You think it’s something they did, sir?” one of the Versailles’ lieutenants asks the XO. He looks at his subordinate in disbelief for a moment, and then lets out a barking laugh that makes me flinch.

“No, Lieutenant Benning. I think someone accidentally nudged the thermostat on the main atmospheric exchanger.”

He looks around at the mixed group of civilians and Navy personnel watching him, and shrugs his shoulders.

“Well, folks, it looks like someone else grabbed the deed to this place, and we just got our eviction notice.”