Vanguard

Chapter 9

“Darcy, you do stupid better than any other smart person I ever met.”

The words of her old drill instructor came back to Mele as she tried to figure out how one Marine was going to defeat Scatha’s base and why she had agreed to volunteer for the job.

Fortunately for Mele’s attempts to plan operations against the invasion, Lieutenant Geary had made good on his promise to drop satellites in stationary orbits over Scatha’s new base, so Mele had been able to accumulate a lot of information pretty quickly.

She wasn’t sure what to make of Rob Geary’s helpfulness. In her experience, fleet support to Marines usually came only grudgingly and after all proper channels had given all proper approvals. But maybe Alfar’s fleet was different from that of Franklin. Or maybe the lieutenant hadn’t been in Alfar’s fleet long enough to learn all the ways to not be helpful in a timely fashion.

Unfortunately, all of the information she was picking up revealed that her task would be even harder than expected. The soldiers that Scatha had landed were conducting patrols in full battle armor around the outside of the base and appeared to have a decent number of military energy pulse or slug thrower rifles. From the numbers seen on the patrols and in other locations, there did indeed appear to be about a hundred soldiers. Four barracks had been placed separate from each other, each in the middle of what was clearly housing for the civilian families, so that taking out a barracks would almost certainly cause civilian deaths. Machinery had quickly excavated entrenchments around the perimeter that would make any attack on the base even more difficult. One of those entrenchments was a big bunker that clearly served as a command post. Warning sensors were planted a ways out from Scatha’s base to provide notice of anyone or anything approaching it. And a few days after the Squall had departed, Mele saw the manta shape of an aerospace craft rise from the base and swoop around on a test flight. Eventually, a second aerospace craft appeared as well.

Granted, the equipment appeared to be older and secondhand. But that still left her facing a hundred soldiers with battle armor and military weaponry, dug in and protected by sensor fields, with two aerospace craft providing air support.

And all she had to counter them were some volunteers, whatever weapons could be scrounged up, and whatever equipment the colony already had that could be used to also support the sort of raid Mele would need to carry out to destroy that antiorbital weapon Scatha’s people were working on.

But she also had the skills she had learned as a Marine for Franklin. And her experience dealing with the sort of soldiers that Scatha had probably sent.

She would need more, though. Fortunately, from all Mele had been able to find out from asking around, Lieutenant Geary’s advice to seek out a certain hacker was on point. Mele had left the open field just outside of the city where a rudimentary training ground was being thrown together by machinery and workers diverted from other tasks, and now paused outside a newly constructed office in a newly constructed building. NINJA IT CONSULTING had been traced in silvery letters on the office door. Mele knocked, then tried the door and, finding it unlocked, went inside.

A slightly disheveled young woman seated before an array of displays and panels looked over at her. “Yeah?”

“Lieutenant Geary sent me,” Mele offered, figuring that would make the best opening.

“He did?” The woman frowned at Mele. “Oh. You’re the grunt. Hi, General.”

Mele shook her head at the other woman. “Sergeant. I work for a living. You’re Lyn Meltzer?”

“Uh-huh. My friends call me Ninja.”

“What do I call you?”

“I haven’t decided yet. The lieutenant told me you’d be stopping by.” She looked Mele up and down. “You were a grunt for Franklin? I only met a few grunts before I got kicked out. They were kind of difficult to deal with.”

“I met plenty of sailors before I got kicked out,” Mele said. “They were also difficult to deal with. Knew their jobs, though.”

“Yeah. So did the grunts. Why’d you leave Franklin?”

“Too many offenses against good order and discipline,” Mele admitted, having come up with a personal appraisal of Lyn Meltzer.

“You got caught, huh?”

“Only when I wanted to be,” Mele said. “Or when I had to take the heat for my red shirts.”

“Your buddies in your unit?” Ninja smiled. “You got booted for the right reasons. Call me Ninja, sister.”

“Thanks.” Mele sat down on the packing container that constituted the other chair in the office. “I got stupid and volunteered to help handle the Scatha mess on the ground here. Lieutenant Geary told me that if anyone can provide me good backup, it’s you.”

“Maybe. What do you need?”

“Anything you can give me. The endgame is to get inside their perimeter and cause a lot of damage. I’ve got basic situational data from overhead collection, but I’m going to need more than that to get the job done right.”

Ninja nodded, her mouth twisted as she thought. “The freighters and shuttles that dropped off Scatha’s people maintained total silence, so I couldn’t get into their systems. What about these guys on the ground? What have they got in the way of protection?”

“An alarmed perimeter. Sensors planted out about twenty kilometers beyond the boundaries of their camp. Foot patrols along the perimeter day and night. A couple of warbirds that fly out a little farther on regular sweeps.”

“Foot patrols? Battle armor?”

“Yeah.”

Ninja gave another nod, grinning. “Outstanding. Most of their security comms will be ground lines to prevent intrusion or detection. But if they’re using foot patrols in battle armor they have to have a wireless net for command and control, and that gives me something to break into. And when I do get in, I should be able to figure out how to get at just about anything in that base. When I dug through the files on the Bucket that the lieutenant captured, I found out that Scatha is big-time into surveillance and monitoring. If you can get access to their secure landline network with a physical tap, I’ll be able to give you the tools to do a whole lot of messing around. Scatha’s secure surveillance network will have a finger in every important system in that encampment of theirs.”

“I like the way you work, Ninja. So you think by monitoring Scatha’s net you’ll be able to help me get in close enough to take out sentries?” Mele asked.

“Think so,” Ninja said. “I’ll give you what I can get after you’ve planted some taps to intercept their net, and you’ll have to decide if it’s enough.”

“That’s a deal,” Mele said. “Can you help me get the taps we need with the right parameters? I’ll see to getting them planted.”

“Good,” Ninja said, grinning again. “Because I am not the crawling through the underbrush commando type. I do my damage online.”

“That’s what I need,” Mele said. “The council must have given you a really good contract.”

Ninja waved a dismissive hand. “It’s okay. The important thing is that Rob Geary asked me to look out for you.”

“He talked a good game.”

“He doesn’t just talk,” Ninja said. “He’s the best in the business.”

Mele heard something in Ninja’s voice and raised her eyebrows at the other woman. “Are you two a thing?”

She smiled again. “Yeah. He hasn’t quite figured it all out yet, though. Do you know who to lean on to get construction of those pickups we need prioritized? No? I do. Leave that to me. Someone owes me a favor. I’ll bill the council for it.”

“Are you sure you’re a sailor?” Mele asked. “You’re acting way too nice to this Marine. Oh, I’ve been talking to some people about getting a few drones built that should be stealthy enough to be able to drop the pickups close enough to listen in on Scatha’s net. I think that’s going fine because the drones are cool toys, so the engineers want to get them built and play with them. Do you think you’ll be able to break whatever encryption Scatha is using?”

“Piece of cake,” Ninja said with another dismissive wave. “I got access to Scatha’s encryption tools when we captured their Bucket. They’ll be using different encryption here, but following the same protocols, so breaking it shouldn’t be too hard.”

“Won’t they have changed the protocols, too?”

“Uh-uh.” Ninja spread her hands. “We’re dealing with a bureaucracy. You know how those work. Change takes a lot of thought and evaluations and getting past the people who like the existing system and the people who run the existing system and hey it’s an emergency so maybe in a few years? And these are ground apes, so whoever they work for will blame Scatha’s space squids for the loss of the Bucket. Not the systems themselves. Blaming other people is a lot easier than trying to replace critical systems. What’s my timeline?”

“Scatha has landed an antiorbital system. They’re getting it set up, but it’ll probably be a few weeks yet because of the construction challenge of emplacing the weapon and getting their main power reactor online.”

“So you want this stuff before then? You want to hit them before they get the antiorbital big gun working?”

“Nope.” Mele flashed her grin at Ninja. “I want to be ready to roll the day they finish getting that antiorbital system operational.”

The field that Glenlyon’s governing council had given Mele lay just outside the current boundaries of the rapidly rising city. It wasn’t much in the way of a training facility, but the field was split by a small creek with steep sides that offered a natural site for obstacle work and a couple of small buildings had been hastily thrown up to offer offices and inside instruction spaces.

She had hoped for fifty volunteers, but only forty men and women had responded to the discreet request for volunteers floated through the colony’s social media. A few of them Mele had been able to dismiss right away because they were too old, too young, or in too bad shape to handle the rigors of training and action. A few others tripped off warning signs during the routine psych screening and were also let go with plausible excuses for why they weren’t needed.

To Mele’s surprise, there had been two ground forces veterans among the volunteers, both former enlisted, both having come from Taniwha like her. One, a man named Grant, had been with the ground forces at Amaterasu, and the other, a man named Spurlick, with the ground forces at Brahma.

Others of the volunteers were techs who might not make great ground soldiers or Marines but whose skills might be critical to carrying out the sort of attack that Mele was envisioning. More importantly, they were willing to volunteer and to work.

She divided her remaining thirty-some volunteers into two groups and started running them through basic conditioning exercises and drills, rotating different men and women through responsibility for leading their group and watching to see who appeared to be a natural leader and anyone who did particularly poorly.

“Why are we bothering with this?” Spurlick demanded of her midway through the second day. “You’ve got me and Grant, so you know who should be your squad leaders.”

“I like to see how people perform,” Mele said, not happy with Spurlick’s tone but keeping her own voice level. She hadn’t been impressed by what she had seen of him so far but didn’t want to rush to judgment.

“I’d be happy to show how I can perform,” Spurlick said with a knowing grin.

“Not interested, even if you weren’t working for me.” Mele thought it didn’t say much for Spurlick’s professionalism, or his brains, that he’d hit on his boss.

“Oh?” Spurlick didn’t hide his unhappiness at the rebuff. “Look, you need me. You just don’t know it. What are you planning, some typical Marine charge at the fortifications head-on and take heavy casualties in a glorious battle? That won’t work.”

“My plans are still being developed,” Mele said, her temper rising. “Where did you get your impression of Marines?”

“Everybody knows about them! Marines all think alike and act alike. I’ll tell you what you should be doing—”

“If I need advice,” Mele broke in, putting force into her voice, “I’ll ask for it.” Without even realizing she had done it, she had straightened as she spoke, taking on an aggressive stance.

Spurlick frowned, changed that to a glower, then stomped off to rejoin his group.

The day was almost over, the two teams running through their last set of drills, when Mele noticed the second team had come to a halt amid arguing loud enough to carry across the field.

It didn’t take a genius to spot the problem. Spurlick was standing by himself, his expression a mix of defiance and smirk. The others in his group were huddled together, either looking angry or trying not to look angry. “What’s going on?” Mele asked a volunteer named Riley as she walked up.

Riley jerked his head toward Spurlick. “He won’t do what anyone else suggests and refuses to suggest anything himself.”

Mele shifted her gaze to Spurlick, keeping her expression unrevealing. “What’s your story?”

Spurlick shrugged. “I’m just trying to do things right.” He didn’t outright say, What are you going to do about it? But his tone and attitude made that extra part clear enough anyway.

“Have you ever heard the old saying ‘Lead, follow, or get out of the way’?” Mele asked, wanting to give him one last chance.

This time he did put it into words. “So?”

“So I’m leading, and you’re in the way.” This latest incident was enough to crystallize her earlier misgivings about Spurlick. “Thank you for volunteering,” Mele recited without putting any feeling into the words. “Your service won’t be required.”

“What?”

“You’re dismissed. Go.”

“Dismissed?” Spurlick glared at her. “I’m the only one here who knows what he’s doing!”

“No,” Mele said. “I think, of the three veterans here, you’re the only one who was kicked out of the service for the right reasons. Now get out of here.”

“The hell I will! You don’t have any power over me!”

Mele had already sized up Spurlick and had no doubt she could take him down, but this was supposed to be a military organization she was building, and in her experience officers didn’t enforce their authority with physical blows. On the other hand, her new recruits weren’t ready for the challenge of dealing with Spurlick if she ordered it.

She pulled out her comm. “Police.”

The response came almost immediately. “Assistant Chief Tanaka here. What’s the problem?”

“I need someone arrested,” Mele said, while Spurlick stared at her. “Inciting riot, failure to comply with lawful authority, and trespassing on official property.”

“Someone will be there within a few minutes.”

Mele pocketed her comm, keeping the corner of her eye on Spurlick, so that when he suddenly rushed her she was prepared. Spurlick’s reaching hand closed on air, and his fist swung at nothing. As Mele dodged and pivoted, she tripped Spurlick with one leg while her stiffened hand landed a blow that left him unconscious before he hit the ground.

Mele shook her hand lightly to relax it after the hit, noticing that the volunteers were all staring at her in gape-mouthed admiration that made her uncomfortable. “Never give your opponent an even break,” she told them. “We’re not practicing for a game here.”

One of the virtues to living in what was still a small city in what was still a small colony was that when called the police were able to arrive quickly. Val Tanaka herself climbed out of the ground vehicle, eyeing Spurlick’s prone body.

“He attacked her!” Riley called. “It was self-defense!”

Tanaka looked at Mele and shook her head. “He attacked you? He’s that stupid?”

“Yeah, he’s that stupid,” Mele said. “I’m not interested in pressing any charges. I don’t have time for that. I just want him off the training area with a clear understanding that he better not show his face here again.”

“Are you sure that’s all you want?” Tanaka asked. “He knows you’re working on something to do to with that Scatha camp. If we let him go, he might decide to go to them and sell whatever he knows.”

Mele paused, wondering if she should insist on Spurlick’s being arrested. What if he did go to Scatha with what he knew?

What if he did? She stepped closer to the officer and lowered her voice. “No. I want him free to go. Did you ever hear that the things you don’t know can be dangerous, but the things you think you do know that are actually wrong are a lot more dangerous? If he goes to that Scatha camp, he might do something worthwhile for us.”

Tanaka raised both eyebrows at her. “How is that?”

“He has no idea what my plans are, but he’s made it clear he thinks I’m incompetent and incapable. He’ll tell Scatha that, and that I’m planning on hitting them head-on like some dumb grunt. And he believes it, and thinks he couldn’t possibly be wrong, so if they scan him, he’ll look truthful. I’d love for Scatha to think all that is true and base their own plans on it.”

“Good thinking.” Tanaka nodded toward Spurlick, who was beginning to stir. “We’ll read him the riot act, let him go, and if he disappears from the colony, I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks.” Mele watched as Val Tanaka cheerfully cuffed Spurlick and hauled him to his feet before shoving him toward her vehicle.

Mele turned back to the others, hoping she had handled Spurlick in the right way to reinforce her authority. “Now let’s do this right.”

Grant Duncan came by as she left that team to their drills. “Permission to speak?”

She snorted at the formal request. “What do you got?”

“I think you handled that guy right. Just in case you were wondering.”

“I was,” Mele said, grateful for the reassurance.

“Are they going to hold him?”

“No. Just make it clear he’d better behave.”

“That kind of guy could make trouble,” Grant warned, his expression serious.

“I know. The cops are going to keep an eye on him. If I make you first squad leader, who would you recommend for second squad?”

“Ummm…” Grant hesitated as he thought. “I’m not sure. Riley shows promise, but he’s totally new at this sort of thing and shows it. Obi is looking really sharp even though she only knows this stuff from gaming. I’d say one of them.”

“Train both so we’d have one as a backup if something happens to you?” Mele suggested.

“Or use both as we expand to three squads. We’re going to have to expand, you know. Thirty ground apes, some of them tech types, aren’t nearly enough to defend a colony this size. Scatha’s base has a lot fewer people in it and covers a lot less acreage, but they’ve got a full company of ground forces.”

“About a company, yeah.” Mele nodded, as much to herself as in acknowledgment that what Grant said was true. She stood looking out across the field to where mountains loomed. The wind coming down from the heights carried scents of something like pine but with a sharper edge, and a chill snap from snow-laden peaks. She had thought about becoming an explorer or scout, being the first to walk places like that and augment orbital surveys. The colony hadn’t been able to focus on that kind of surveying yet, but hopefully that option would exist once she’d finished helping out with this problem. “Yeah, this place will have to get a lot more serious about defending themselves. But I’m only in charge right now because I’m all they’ve got. I’m figuring they’ll bring in some officers sooner rather than later to run this outfit, and I’ll probably be out on my ear again. Until then, we can build a decent basis for a bigger outfit.”

“And then those officers will take credit for it,” Grant said.

“Yeah,” Mele agreed with a laugh.

The next morning, Mele took a break from leading training when a police vehicle pulled up at the edge of the field. Worrying that Spurlick had done something superstupid, she jogged over to it.

“Hey, Marine. No problems this morning. I’ve just got a load for you,” Val Tanaka said, stepping out of her vehicle. “This is what the colony has been able to collect for you.”

Mele reached the vehicle as Val began pulling out a variety of weapons. Mele hefted one of the hunting rifles, putting it to her shoulder and turning to sight along it across the open land beyond the city. “Not bad.”

“One of the best we got,” Val said. “Four hunting rifles, two target pistols, and a half dozen shockers. That’s the rest of it.”

Twelve weapons for thirty volunteers including Mele. And only four of those able to deliver lethal blows. The in-theory-easy-to-reprogram construction bays were having problems with the available designs of military-grade weapons, so this was all they’d have for the near future. Mele shook her head. “It’ll have to do.”

“Can it?” Val Tanaka asked. “Seriously. I’ve got no idea, but I heard you say those Scatha soldiers have battle armor. I’ve seen that stuff. It’s bad news.”

“It is,” Mele agreed. She gestured toward the rifle she still held in one hand, the barrel pointed at the ground. “But if I can get close enough, this can handle that armor. I know that gear. It’s the same stuff Brahma imported from Old Earth, so at Franklin we drilled on how to combat it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Brahma resold it to Scatha.”

“It’s got weak points?”

“Everything has got weak points.” Mele set the rifle down carefully, then grinned at Val. “Armor. Weapons. People.”

“You’re the expert.” Tanaka looked down at the small arsenal, then back at Mele. “I was thinking.”

“That can get you into trouble,” Mele said.

“I know,” Val agreed. She pointed at one of the shockers. “I’ve spent a good chunk of my life working with these. Weapons designed to disable, not to harm. Oh, they can be misused. Anything can. But basically, the idea is not to kill with them.”

Mele nodded, letting her own expression grow serious. “Whereas I’m in the business of killing and need weapons that do that.”

“Does it bother you?”

“Sure it does. But I don’t do it because someone ordered it or because I want something,” Mele said. “I do it because if I don’t, people like you would get killed by apes like those guys from Scatha.”

“Yeah,” Val agreed. “I just found myself wondering where it all might lead. I know a little bit of history from Old Earth, the sort of junk that happened there.” She looked up at the sky as if the already-legendary globe of Earth would be visible above them. “And I thought, what if we ever get to the point where it happens here? Wars like they had back on Old Earth, where nobody uses shockers, and it’s just about killing. What if our descendants forget that once upon a time we thought not killing was important?”

“I don’t see how it could ever get that bad,” Mele said. “Glenlyon is not happy to be doing this. I can feel it. They’re only getting into military options because that’s all there are with Scatha playing hardball.”

“I hope you’re right,” Val Tanaka said. “But look at what’s happening now. How many times back at Franklin did you use your training in earnest?”

“You mean actual combat?” Mele shrugged. “Once. A hostage-rescue operation. The hostage takers were some paramilitary bunch, though, not a real professional outfit.”

“But here you are facing a bunch of soldiers, and we’ve already dealt with a warship threatening us.” Val shook her head. “This isn’t like the Old Colonies. Everything has gone off the rails. Who knows where we might end up?”

“All I can promise,” Mele said, “is that as long as I’m calling the shots, we’re not going to end up anywhere you’d be unhappy with.”

“How long will you be calling the shots?”

“Probably only until they can replace me.” Mele slapped Val on the shoulder. “But until then, I am going to lead this outfit in the right ways. Hey, I need to get over to the mining offices. Can you give me a lift?”

Getting to Scatha’s base without getting shot to pieces meant coming in on the ground was out. Coming in by air, using one of the available shuttles, would just have been a more complicated form of suicide than a ground approach.

Which, Mele knew, left one available option. And that led her to the tech offices of the newly named Glenlyon Mining Corporation.

Not so long a time ago on a planet far, far away, Gunnery Sergeant Chopra had explained to a younger Mele how to get things done even if whatever it was apparently couldn’t be done.

“You don’t go to the boss,” Chopra had advised. “And you don’t go to the admin people who approve stuff. You go direct to the techs. The engineers. But you don’t go in and say, ‘The equipment can’t do what I need. Can you make it do that?’ Because if you do, the engineers will say, ‘No, it can’t do that,’ because people tell them to do crazy stuff all the time, and they’ll be tired of that. What you do is go in to them and say, ‘I just want to confirm this gear can do this,’ and the engineers say, ‘Yeah, it can do that.’ Then you say, ‘What I really need is this other thing, but the scientists I talked to said it can’t be done.’ And they’ll look real annoyed and say, ‘Scientists? You mean theory guys? What is it you need done?’ And then the engineers look at the specs and start talking to each other, and figuring out how to do it, because there’s nothing an engineer loves more than doing something that a scientist says can’t be done. Nine times out of ten, they’ll figure out a way to do it, or a way that ought to do it. And they’ll build it.”

Gunnery Sergeant Chopra had paused to give Mele a warning look. “What you got to look out for then is that whatever the engineers built might not meet everyday rules for safety and common sense. It if looks like that to you, make sure you’re outside any potential blast radius before they try it out the first time.”

That was why Mele was walking into the tech offices, where two men and a woman looked up at her with open suspicion.

“Hi,” Mele said. “I’m Sergeant Darcy, working on dealing with that base that Scatha set up. I figure I need to approach it belowground, so I came to you guys to make sure one of your mine snakes can handle it.”

“A tunnel dig? Where at?” one of the engineers asked, still eyeing Mele with mistrust.

“Do you have data on the area around where Scatha landed?” She knew they did but waited for them to look it up. A layered display revealed the surface geography as plotted by orbital mapping. “I need to keep Scatha’s people from seeing it, so I figured we could come in on the far side of these hills and start digging down about here, going to about here,” Mele said, indicating a point short of Scatha’s sensor field.

“Yeah, that’s easy,” the female engineer commented. “A two-meter snake can handle that without any problem. Why are you stopping the dig so far out?”

“It’s this sensor field,” Mele explained, sweeping her hand across the image. “It’ll pick up vibrations from the digging if I get too close.”

The third engineer shook his head. “There’s a big river running right through there. All that water is going to be putting a lot of vibrations into the environment. And the coast is, what, twenty kilometers to the west? What are the waves like?”

“Fairly strong,” Mele said. “It’s potentially a good harbor, but until a breakwater is built up along this row of submerged rocks, the waves can roll right in off the ocean.”

“So you’ve got good wave action hitting the area, too. What’s the subsurface like?”

The woman engineer answered as she called up the data. “We’ve got satellite scans showing an average of four meters of topsoil. That’s a floodplain, isn’t it? Under that is several layers of sedimentary rock.”

“Sandstone?” the third engineer asked.

“Overhead scans saw a mix of siltstone farther inland and limestone closer to the coast.”

“That’ll conduct vibrations from the wave action and the river pretty well,” the first engineer remarked.

Mele feigned surprise. “Do you think there’s a way to get the dig closer without its being detected? The approval office told me that was impossible.”

“Approval office?” the third engineer said with disgust. “How close do you really want to get?”

“In my dreams? Here,” Mele said, pointing to a spot inside the sensor field.

“How good are the sensors?”

“Here are the specs on them as best we know.”

The three engineers huddled, calling up diagrams and schematics and soil-characteristic data. “That’s doable,” the first engineer finally said. “We bring the snake in along that line. Not the one you thought of. This will make better use of the geology. The snake sends out worms ahead to monitor the vibrations in the environment and send that data back to the snake so it can adjust digging speed to keep the noise low enough. You’re going through topsoil, so it won’t require eating rock.”

“Rock eating can get noisy,” the female engineer told Mele. “The snake seals the tunnel sides as it goes using instacrete, so you won’t have to worry about tunnel integrity.”

“We ought to modify these parts to reduce the operating noise,” the third engineer suggested.

“Yeah, good idea since it’s only going through soil. Add that in and… How soon do you need this dig started?” the woman engineer asked.

“Yesterday,” Mele said. “I’ve got to hit Scatha before they get more stuff landed. You guys can really do this?”

“Sure we can,” the first engineer assured her. “It’s an interesting challenge. But it’ll take a day or two to get this ready, and you’ll need someone to tell the front office the council will pay for it.”

“You guys are lifesavers!” Mele said, not having to fake her relief. “Oh, I’ve got to tell you, this needs to be kept really quiet. If Scatha finds out I’m planning to go in this way, they’d be waiting for me and…”

“Yeah,” the third engineer said, nodding. “So this is real top secret stuff, huh?”

“It really is,” Mele said. “Once we’ve hit Scatha, they’ll search for and find the dig, so you can talk about it then. You said the tunnel will be two meters in diameter? That’ll be a little tight, but we can run.”

“No,” the woman engineer said. “Use a tunnelpede.”

“Tunnelpede?”

“Long, low, lots of little soft wheels. Designed to go into tight places where you might not want a lot of vibrations, you know? Like checking on cave-ins or unstable areas. Just get a tunnelpede long enough for everyone in your group to ride. How are you planning on getting the snake there? One of the WinGs?”

“Yeah,” Mele said. “Can one of the smaller ones handle the snake?”

“Sure can,” the first engineer advised. “Don’t talk to Don. He’s supposed to be in charge of scheduling the WinGs, but Bettine is the one who really handles that. She’ll set you up.”

As Mele walked out of the building, she looked up at the sky in what she hoped was the general direction of Franklin. “Thanks, Gunny!”

The WinG park had been set up down near the coast. All three Wing-in-Ground vehicles were there when Mele arrived. The WinGs only flew a few meters above the surface of the water, but the ground-effect cushion that lofted them allowed WinGs to transport waterborne ship-sized cargos at aerospace craft speeds, and the WinGs could land on water or on beaches or other unimproved sites, making them perfect for new colonies on new worlds.

The big WinG loomed over the others, roughly cylindrical, thirty meters wide and over a hundred fifty meters long, with broad, stubby wings mounted low and propulsion mounted high, and large aerospace craft maneuvering surfaces aft. The two smaller WinGs were each about forty meters long and ten meters wide, shaped similarly to their larger sister.

None of them carried any armament, but because they flew so low, one of the smaller WinGs could easily come in from the right direction to remain hidden from the Scatha base behind the low hills as it delivered the mining snake. As far as improvised combat-delivery vehicles went, the WinGs were as good as it got.

Mele went into the small office attached to a maintenance hangar, looking for Bettine.

Two days later, a visit from Val Tanaka interrupted another training session. “Your boy Spurlick is officially missing.”

“Any clues?” Mele asked.

“Pretty big clues, actually. He volunteered to assist a team recovering an automated weather station along the coast about fifty kilometers south of where Scatha set up shop. When it came time to leave, he was nowhere to be found. I’d tipped off the team leader that might happen, so they didn’t panic, and after a decent search to make sure he really had run, they reported it and came on back.”

“Thanks, Val. You keep bringing me good news.” Mele grinned. “You know, it’s getting so I’m actually looking forward to seeing a police officer coming to talk to me.”

Val Tanaka shook her head at Mele. “I know an act when I see one, Sergeant Darcy. You’re not a bad girl. You just like testing limits. And right now, you’ve got a job that is testing your own limits in a good way. Let’s keep it like that.”

“I’ll think about it,” Mele said. “By the way, if you need to pass on anything else in the next twelve hours or so, just get ahold of Grant Duncan. I’m going to be busy.”

Val raised her eyebrows at Mele. “Out of town?”

“Way out.”

“Be careful. Do you need a ride to the WinG station?”

Mele nodded. “In about half an hour.”

“It’s a quiet day. I can wait. You’re less likely to be noticed if you’re scrunched down in my ride.”

Unlike the hard but smoother grass of the area around the city, the scrub underneath Mele had sharp, small needles on tiny, stubby branches. Mele breathed a silent curse as she acquired cuts on exposed flesh while she wormed her way high enough to see over the rise. The plants gave off a slightly spicy, slightly musky scent that threatened to make her sneeze. Overhead, stars shone in patterns that still felt unfamiliar. The silence of the night around her was broken by occasional clicks and cheeps from unseen insects. Glenlyon didn’t seem to have evolved anything like snakes, but there were a variety of small weasel-like creatures that could be trouble if their nests were disturbed, so Mele kept a careful watch as she crawled forward.

Scatha liked lights, it seemed. The base was brightly lit, with floods shining both inward and outward along the edges. Mele narrowed her eyelids to keep from losing all of her night vision, then eased back down and hauled out the drone a team of engineers had modified to be as stealthy as could be managed. The engineers had had so much fun with it that Mele had found it hard to “borrow” for the time needed to get her task done.

Loading passive signal collectors each the size of her thumb onto the drone, Mele breathed a short prayer before cautiously activating the drone and letting it rise less than a meter above the scrub. The signal collectors, at first pale against the darker drone, quickly shaded to match their surroundings, becoming very hard to see.

If the drone had sent out signals, or if Mele had transmitted commands to it, Scatha’s sensors would have picked them up and alerted the defenders. Instead, a nearly invisible and very hard to break fiber-optic cord connected to Mele’s controller unspooled from the drone as it slid toward Scatha’s base. Each signal collector was linked to the cord as well, so that together they formed a network that could transmit whatever they overheard back along the cord to a relay transmitter out of sight of Scatha’s sensors.

Mele had to estimate where to drop each sensor so that the long pin on the bottom would plunge into the topsoil and hold the sensor upright in place. One, two, three…

A spotlight mounted on a sensor pole came to life, playing over the sensor field in the general area where the drone was. Something must have spotted the movement of the drone. Mele dropped the last two pickups, then made the drone zig and zag wildly a couple of times before ordering it back up the slope at a fast clip, then dropping it low and slow. A sensor tech wanting to impress her had told Mele about that trick, which would lead anything detecting that movement to conclude a small animal had tripped the sensors.

She waited, tense, as the light flicked back and forth, but it never settled on the drone.

She got the drone back, carefully deactivated it, then slid down the back slope, out of sight of the base. Planting the relay unit didn’t take long. Mele plugged in the fiber-optic link to the pickups, touched the link commands, and within a minute got the confirmation signals from the satellite overhead and the signal collection pickups. The relay would compress everything the signal collectors picked up and send it in second-long bursts up to the satellite, which would send the material on to Ninja.

Mele took the risk of crawling up the rise again to study what could be seen of Scatha’s base. After several minutes of lying unmoving, she spotted what she had been looking for, the distant shapes of two soldiers patrolling the inner edge of the sensor field. She watched them intently, getting a personal feel for how those soldiers were moving and acting. As far as she could tell, Scatha’s soldiers weren’t looking around as they trudged along their patrol route, instead depending on their armors’ sensors to alert them to any dangers that they clearly did not think threatened. They had probably heard that Glenlyon lacked any ground forces or military equipment, and nothing had happened since they arrived to cause them to think that Glenlyon would do anything but complain about their presence.

Mele wondered whether Spurlick had already made it to Scatha’s base. Probably not. Spurlick hadn’t looked like he could cover that much ground that fast. Still, she was glad that her best route to plant the pickups had been on the north side of Scatha’s camp while Spurlick would be coming in from the south. There wasn’t any chance of his stumbling across her.

Finally, Mele slid back down the rise and, keeping low, ran along the back side of the terrain until she reached the place where WinG Bravo rested behind a higher slope. She paused long enough to let the people inside the WinG identify her, then gratefully climbed into the personnel hatch that opened on the side.

“How was it?” one of the pilots asked, as the other gently brought the WinG up and around.

“Piece of cake,” Mele said, gratefully drinking from the water bulb offered by the pilot.

“How come you’re sweating so much, then?”

“Gland condition,” Mele said.

The pilot laughed as WinG Bravo accelerated along the ground, over the beach in a flash, and swung south to avoid being spotted by Scatha’s base.