Terms of Enlistment

Chapter 21

The XO sends us out in teams to take stock of the station’s supplies. Even with the personnel we brought, there’s enough food and water to last for months. Between their stores and the small arms locker on the drop ship, we can arm everyone in our group to the teeth and keep them fed and sheltered until the relief ship gets to Willoughby. One thing we didn’t bring, however, is enough oxygen to keep everyone breathing once the air on this planet goes bad.

“What do we have for transportation?” the XO asks when we gather in the mess hall again to compile the inventory.

“There’s a half dozen cargo mules in the shed outside, and two ultralights,” Halley reports.

“How do you get to the main base and back?” Commander Campbell asks the administrator, a lanky, gray-haired man named Hayward who looks like he spends most of his time working outside with his hands.

“Puddle jumper,” he replies. “Atmospheric shuttle from Willoughby City. Comes out twice a month, or by request if there’s a medical issue our doc can’t fix.”

“That’s a long ride,” Halley says. “That place is, what, three thousand klicks south?”

“Twenty-eight hundred. Six hours each way, if the weather’s good.”

“Take us two weeks to drive with these mules, even if we could carry enough fuel to make the trip,” the XO says. Mister Hayward shakes his head.

“You’d never get there. There’s a mountain range and an ocean strait between here and there.”

“Well, shit,” the XO says. “Looks like we’re waiting out the cavalry right here, then.”

“You got any fuel stores at all?” Halley asks Mister Hayward. “I mean, other than the juice for the mules and those ultralights.”

“There’s a tank buried by the landing pad. That one’s full of JP-101AA. It’s for the puddle jumpers. They usually carry enough for a round trip, but we have some anyway, just in case. Five thousand gallons.”

“JP-101AA,” Halley repeats.

“Yeah. Atmospheric aviation. Can your ride use that stuff?”

“Those are multifuel engines,” she replies. “We’ll have less thrust, and we’ll need to stay in atmo, but yeah, they’ll burn one-oh-one.”

“We don’t have a refueller,” Mister Hayward says. “Just a portable manual pump. It’ll take forever to fill that monster.” He looks out of the window, where the drop ship is visible a few hundred feet away. “How much fuel does one of those hold, anyway?”

“Twenty-one thousand eight hundred and forty-four pounds,” Halley replies without missing a beat.

One of the techs lets out a low whistle.

“That’s damn near forty-five hundred gallons,” he says to Mister Hayward. “Looks like we’re getting cleaned out with one fill-up.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Mister Hayward replies, and turns off the portable terminal in front of him. “I have a feeling there’ll be little demand for that stuff around here by the end of the month.”

The refueling takes four hours, even with a dozen people working on the process. Trying to fuel a Wasp-class drop ship with a manual pump and fuel hoses with non-standard coupling is like trying to fill a bathtub by wringing out wet towels over it. We all take turns holding open the fuel ports on the upper hull of the Wasp by hand, and feeding the wrist-thin hoses of the little emergency hand pump system directly into the sealed tanks. By the time the tanks are full, we all smell like aviation fuel, even the XO.

“So, the bird is full,” Commander Campbell declares when we gather in the mess hall again. “We’ll be going down to see what’s going on at Willoughby City. I’d rather not take everyone along for this, just in case we run into trouble.”

“No argument,” Mister Hayward says. “We’re not military. We’d just be baggage to you guys.”

“I suggest we go light,” Halley says. “I’ve never flown this thing with atmo fuel in it, so I have no idea how much she’ll lift, anyway.”

“What if you run into trouble, sir?” Corporal Schaefer asks. “You may want some rifles on the ground when you get there.”

Commander Campbell shakes his head.

“Not likely, Corporal. Let’s be realistic—if that colony’s gone, the bad guys have more firepower than we can handle, and the four of you aren’t going to make any difference. I’d rather be able to make a quick exit without having to worry about getting your guys down safely, too.”

“Understood, sir,” the corporal says.

“Lieutenant Adams, you’re in charge while I’m gone. If we lose comms, and we’re not back in twelve hours at the most, you are to stay holed up and wait for the rescue ship to arrive, is that clear?”

“Aye-aye, sir,” the lieutenant replies. “Stay put and wait for the cavalry.”

“Corporal Schaefer, you and your men will unload the drop ship’s armory and supply lockers while Ensign Halley does her preflight. Just leave us three rifles and a launcher, in case we end up having to put down in the boonies. I don’t want all that hardware going to waste if they blot us out of the sky.”

“Copy that, sir. We’ll get right on it.”

“Very well.” The commander claps his hands again. “Let’s get this show on the road, people.”

“Here we go again,” Halley says as we strap into our seats in the cockpit once again. The engines are warming up, but their drone sounds different now, lower and rougher than before.

“Make sure those straps are tight,” she advises. “If we have to bail out, you don’t want to slip out of your harness on eject.”

“That would be bad,” I agree. “Now would you stop talking about ejecting out of this thing? I’m not too keen on adding a parachute ride to my list of new experiences today.”

“Oh, those are kind of fun,” Halley says. “In a white-knuckled terror sort of way.”

I watch as she goes through her pre-flight checklists, at a more leisurely pace than back in the Versailles’ hangar a few hours ago.

“Okay, board’s green. We’re looking good. Are you strapped in back there, Commander?”

“That’s affirmative,” the XO replies over the intercom. “Take us up whenever you’re ready.”

Halley seizes her throttle and stick, and a few moments later, we are hovering above the landing pad. She waggles the tail of the ship left and right cautiously to test the control surfaces. Once again, I am amazed at how agile such a huge, ugly machine can be.

“Here we go,” she says, and increases thrust. “Stinger Six-Two is back in business.”

Soon, we are once again cruising twenty thousand feet above the rocky surface of the peninsula.

“Give me the bearing for the settlement again,” Halley says. I check the satellite map on the admin deck.

“Willoughby City is at bearing one-seven-niner from the terraforming station, distance two-eight-two-one nautical miles.”

“Give me the coordinates, please.”

I read off the satellite coordinates, and she plugs them into her navigation console.

“There. Now the computer in this bird knows where we’re headed. Makes me feel a little better about going back into that.”

She points at the windshield, and the huge storm cell that’s blanketing the continent ahead.

Without the ability to go into space, the drop ship is merely a huge, inefficient aircraft. Halley is not happy with the way the ship behaves with the inferior fuel in its tanks.

“This thing feels like someone put in a governor,” she says when we are crossing the mountain range mentioned by Mr. Hayward earlier. “I’m having trouble just getting up to twenty thousand feet, and I’m getting four hundred knots airspeed. We should be almost twice as fast.”

“Better than walking, though,” I say.

“Barely. I feel like I’m transporting a hold full of rocks.”

On the way to the central settlement, Halley picks up more emergency locator beacons from stranded escape pods. By now, we’re back above severe weather, and even though Halley broadcasts our presence every few minutes on the emergency channel, nobody on the ground is answering. Halley reads out the coordinates of the downed pods as they pop up on her TacLink screen, and I enter them into the satellite map on my admin deck. None of the pods are closer than a hundred miles from our flight path, and the XO tells Halley not to divert the ship when she asks him over the intercom.

“They have supplies and commo gear,” he says. “I don’t want to fill this bird up with hitchhikers and end up killing everyone. Besides, we don’t have the fuel. They’ll be okay until the rescue ship gets here.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” Halley replies.

The storm clouds cover the planet like a funeral shroud, denying us a view of whatever is roaming the surface. Some species is taking over the planet, transforming it to fit their needs, and we won’t find out what we’re facing until we descend into the dark maelstrom below to put our fragile selves right among them. I feel like a little kid who has just been tasked by his parents to venture into the monster-filled basement for an unimportant errand.

I’ve lost track of our time aloft when Halley finally points the nose of the ship at the angry-looking clouds below.

“Get ready for some bounce,” she tells us. “We’re fifty miles out. I’m going lower to see if I can get a fix on the AILS beam.”

I watch with dread as we descend toward the clouds, where sporadic flashes of lightning illuminate the dark sky. As soon as we enter the clouds, the ship gets buffeted again, but this turbulence doesn’t feel as severe as the violent winds we encountered on our first descent through the storm.

“Willoughby Control, this is Navy flight Stinger Six-Two,” Halley transmits. “We’re four-niner miles north, inbound for AILS landing.”

There’s nothing but static in return, and Halley repeats the broadcast twice before giving up with a shrug.

“All their nav gear is up and running. I can see the radio beacon and the AILS beam. Whatever happened down there, they still have juice.”

When we break through the cloud cover, the ground isn’t quite as close as it was when we picked up the XO earlier. The rain has slacked off to a drizzle. When Halley levels off the ship, we’re two thousand feet above the ground, and I can see half a mile into the distance.

“Weather’s getting better,” Halley says. “Looks like we may not even need the AILS.”

I crane my neck to look at the ground below, trying to spot the alien beings that ought to be easy to see even from this altitude, but there’s nothing moving down there. The landscape looks as boringly monotone as the rocky plateaus and hills back by the outpost.

“Thirty miles out,” Halley declares. “Nothing going on down there. I have zip on radar and infrared.” All I see ahead is the radio beacon.”

“Stay sharp,” the XO says over the intercom. “First sign of trouble, you get us back up above the soup.”

“Oh, don’t you fucking worry about that,” Halley mutters under her breath without toggling the transmit button on her stick.

The town that pops out of the misty haze half a mile in front of us looks untouched. As we get closer, I can see rows of pre-fabricated buildings, lined up on a neat grid of concrete mesh roads. The administrator back at the terraforming station called this settlement Willoughby City, but that title seems grandiose.

Halley makes a high pass above the settlement, banking the Wasp into a tight spiral turn to get a look at the ground. I peer past her through the thick armored glass of the starboard canopy, but I see nothing out of the ordinary. The houses and roads look undamaged. I can see lights on many of the buildings.

“Looks fine to me,” Halley says. “Let’s go a little lower and take a closer look.”

We make another pass over the city, this time much lower and slower than before. This time, I notice something else down below, something that wasn’t obvious from almost two thousand feet up. There are people down there after all, but they’re not reacting to the drop ship overflying the settlement at low altitude. They’re lying on the concrete latticework of the road grid, slumped up against the walls of the buildings, or face down on the ochre-colored dust of the ground between the houses. Most of them are lying on the ground alone or in pairs, prone on their stomachs or flat on their backs, as if the entire colony decided to take a collective nap at the same time. My mouth is suddenly very dry, and I can feel my heart hammering in my chest. When I look at Halley, I see that she is biting her lower lip as she’s watching the scene below.

“Commander, you better come up front and take a look at this yourself,” she says into the intercom.

A few moments later, Commander Campbell appears in the cockpit hatch behind us. He grabs hold of both our seats to steady himself, and leans over to my side of the ship to look at the ground below. Without a word of explanation, Halley merely puts the ship into a gentle portside turn to give him a better view of the graveyard the colony has become.

“My God,” the XO says in a toneless voice.

“All the buildings are intact,” I say. “I don’t see any damage at all. What the hell did they do to them?”

“Fucked if I know,” Halley replies. “But if you don’t mind, Commander, I’d rather not land this thing and risk contamination.”

I hadn’t even considered a ChemWar attack, but now that Halley voices her concern, I feel very uneasy about our low flight level. I know it’s just my overactive, terrified brain playing tricks on me, but I imagine a cloud of lethal contaminant getting stirred up by the downdraft of the ship’s engines. Back in ChemWar class, we were shown videos of chemical and biological attacks from the last major tiff with the Chinese and Koreans back on Earth, and the closeups of hapless NAC troopers who died by choking on their bloody vomit left a lasting impression in my memory.

“Let’s not,” the XO agrees. “I don’t feel like puking out my lungs today. Take her back up, and let’s get on the radio, see if anyone’s made it out of there. Maybe their Marines had their suits on.”

We circle above the settlement at high altitude for a while, trying to contact the Marines that may have made it out of the city. Halley sends challenges on the Marine field frequency for twenty minutes while flying a holding pattern, but once again, there’s no reply.

“If they’re within fifty miles, they should hear us,” she says. “I can’t do this much longer if we want to make it back to the terraformer on what’s left in the tank.”

“Understood,” the XO says. “Make another loop south, and then let’s head back to the barn.”

“That’s a whole lot of flying done for nothing,” I say to Halley in a low voice, careful to keep my finger away from the transmit button. She merely shrugs in response.

“Beats sitting on our asses and waiting for the next Navy boat to come pick us up.”

There’s a soft chirp on her TacLink console, and she turns her attention to it. She taps the screen, reads the display for a moment, and then sits up straight with a jolt.

“What is it?” I ask, dreading more bad news heading our way.

“Emergency transponder,” she says. “It’s the other drop ship from the Versailles. Stinger Six-One.”

Her fingers do a rapid little dance on the comms console as she goes to a different frequency.

“Stinger Six-One, this is Halley in Six-Two. I’m picking up your beacon two-niner miles to my south. If anyone down there can hear me, please respond.”

Again, we get no reply. Halley repeats the broadcast two more times, and then lets out an exasperated little snort.

“I swear, this is the Planet of Broken Fucking Radios, or something. I’m getting tired of talking to myself out here.”

She toggles her intercom button.

“Commander, I’m picking up the emergency beacon from our other drop ship. I’m going to try and eyeball the site, check if anyone’s made it out.”

“Go ahead,” the XO says.

When we’re back in the weather, Halley runs a radar sweep of the ground ahead of us. I look over at her sensor screen as the display shows a wedge-shaped segment of the planet surface below and in front of us, swept from side to side in short intervals by the focused beam from the drop ship’s radar transmitter.

“We don’t usually run continuous ground sweeps like that,” Halley says when she notices that I’m watching the screen. “That radar lights up threat warning receivers like a Christmas tree. If we had SRA down there, it would be like turning on a huge billboard that says ‘Shoot Me’.”

“You know what? I almost wish those were just SRA troopers down there,” I say, and she smiles.

“Yeah. Who would have thought we’d ever wish for that, huh?”

Suddenly, the ship transitions out of the heavy cloud cover and into clear weather with startling abruptness. One moment, we’re flying among drifting bands of rain in zero visibility, the next moment we’re in calm skies. I look out of the port cockpit window in surprise, and see a wall of clouds receding behind the ship. I can see the ground a few thousand feet below us. It looks like we just crossed into the eye of a hurricane. We’re in a huge bowl of calm weather that looks like it’s twenty miles or more across.

“Holy living fuck,” Halley says next to me, in a tone of profound awe and astonishment.

In front of the ship, right in the center of this clear patch of sky, there’s an enormous spire reaching into the sky. It’s the color of dirty snow, and so tall that I can’t see the top of it even after craning my neck and peering through the top panel of the drop ship’s windshield. In relation to its height, the structure seems impossibly thin, but even at this distance, it’s obvious that the trunk is a few hundred yards in diameter. It flares out at the bottom, like the lower section of a tree.

“What the hell is that?”

“You want to come up here and take a look at this, sir,” Halley tells the XO, who promptly unstraps from his jump seat once more and steps forward into the cockpit.

“Jesus,” he says when he sees the spire rising into the dark clouds ahead of us.

“I have nothing on radar,” Halley says in astonishment.

“Come again?”

“It’s not showing on radar,” she replies, and cycles through display modes on her screen. “Ground radar, air-to-air mode, millimeter wave—not a damn thing. If the weather hadn’t cleared up back there all of a sudden, we could have flown right into that thing without ever seeing it.”

“Looks like they’ve been busy,” the XO says. “They’ve built that thing in less than a month?”

To me, the structure rising from the surface of the planet doesn’t look built at all. There are no visible supports, no protrusions or seams. The surface of the spire looks smooth and uninterrupted. It looks like an enormous tree stripped of its bark.

“The emergency beacon is five degrees off our bow, four miles ahead,” Halley says. “Right near the base of that.”

“Just fly around it for now,” the XO orders. “Keep your distance. I don’t want to add another crash beacon to the first one.”

The patch of calm weather seems to be perfectly circular, and the tall, white structure is right in the center of it. Halley turns the Wasp to the left, putting us on a course that’s parallel to the outer walls of this strange eye in the storm.

“It shows up on infrared,” she says. “It’s not like a furnace or anything, but it’s definitely throwing out some heat.”

“Yeah, but what the hell is it?”

I lean forward to look up through the top windshield panel again. The clouded sky overhead is a little lighter in color that the wall of clouds towering to the left of the ship in the distance, and as I look at the cloud cover directly above the Wasp, I get a sense of swift movement, like a front of storm clouds rushing across the sky in a high wind. The flood of lead-gray clouds is pouring straight out from the center of the storm’s eye, and flowing toward the walls.

“It’s a terraformer,” I say. “Atmospheric exchanger, whatever they call it. Look at that.”

Halley follows my gaze with her own, and the XO leans forward over the center console to get a glimpse of what we’re looking at.

“I think you may be right, Mister Grayson,” he says. “And if that’s the case, I think we’re off this rock for good.”

He retreats from his uncomfortably stretched position, and settles in a crouch between the pilot seats.

“It took us fifteen fucking years to build a terraforming network on this rock and get it fit for people to live on. If these things can waltz in here and set up a working network of their own in three weeks…”

He leaves the sentence unfinished, but I get the sentiment. If this is a working atmospheric exchanger, the alien species is so much more advanced that trying to compete with them for the same real estate would be like showing up at an architecture competition with a child’s erector set and a few rolls of polymer sheets.

“Let’s get a little closer to that beacon, but be careful.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” Halley replies. “You may want to buckle in again back there, just in case.”

We make a wide turn to the right, until the enormous white spire is right in the center of the Wasp’s windshield. The appearance of it somehow matches that of the beings which erected it—tall, thin, graceful, and imposing. Halley does a quick measurement with the optical targeting system of the Wasp, and declares that the structure ahead measures twenty-eight hundred feet from its base to the point where the stem disappears in the clouds overhead.

“I’m getting the faintest return on radar now,” she says. “I’m going to stop painting it with the beam. Don’t want to piss off the locals.”

From our position, the spot where the beacon is sending out its regular, mindless electronic wails is on the opposite side of the huge stem. Halley decreases altitude while taking the ship around the trunk in a left-hand turn that gives me a perfect view of the structure. By now, we’re less than a quarter mile away from it, and I can see small imperfections in the surface I hadn’t noticed before, irregular bumps and knots that reinforce the grown look of the spire.

“Five hundred feet up,” Halley says. “That’s about as low as I care to go, I think.”

The place where the other drop ship crashed into the planet’s surface is easy to spot. There’s an impact mark on the ground, just a few hundred feet from the base of the spire, and a scorched furrow leading away from the initial mark. At the end of the blackened scar in the rocky soil, there’s a debris field, and the shattered wreck of what was once Stinger Six-One. The remains of the drop ship are mangled so badly that I wouldn’t recognize it if I didn’t know what a Wasp looks like in undamaged condition. Halley makes a low pass over the crash site, and I can see that parts of the wreckage are still burning.

“See any chutes?” Halley asks.

“I don’t know. What am I looking for?”

“The outside of the canopy is camo, and the inside orange. You can use ‘em as signal markers for the SAR birds.”

I look around the crash site as we circle overhead, but I don’t see anything other than broken and twisted bits of drop ship. When I glance over to the base of the alien structure, I notice something else, however—there are scorch marks and impact splatters marring the surface of the spire.

“Looks like your buddies tried to take a chunk out of it,” I say to Halley, and point to the damage. She looks over to the stem and observes the impact marks for a moment.

“Well, shit. So they did. The dumbass Rickman thinks with his balls most of the time. Figures he’d make an attack run on that thing.”

“Wonder how they brought that ship down. Think they got weapons?”

“I’m not too interested in finding out,” Halley says. “Let’s get out of here before we do.”