Emile and the Dutchman (3 page)

IV

"How's it look, Emmy?" The Dutchman belted himself into his couch.

I nodded. "Not bad, Major." I tapped at the screen. "That's the best landing zone, if you want to make contact at that village."

"Does mean a bit of a hike if we have to go out and meet the locals."

"Yes, sir, but it's flat enough to give me a bit of room to bring the shuttle down."

"Oh? You need a lot of room for error?" He flicked a finger against his own wings. "Back when I was using these for a living, I didn't."

I didn't answer that. For one thing, I didn't believe that the Dutchman had been all that hot a pilot in his youth; he didn't have the look. For another, anything I said to that effect was sure to get me gigged for insubordination.

I pointed at the monitor. "Maybe you want to pick another village, sir? The
nearest
flat ground to the village you picked out has no margin for error, not unless we blast something clear."

"Hmm." Norfeldt puffed on his cigar for a moment, then examined the stub and pitched it into the oubliette. "Shit. I guess I can use the exercise. We'll do it your way."

Trying to ignore the way the white-and-blue bulk of the planet overfilled the screens, I ran the ballistics program again, just to be sure.

"What
are
you doing, Emmy?"

"Everything's fine, sir. The comp knows where we are, and there's nothing else in this sky; I should be able to rendezvous by radar, if necessary."

He snorted. "Kid, if we have to depend on you to pantseat it back up here, we're in deep shit. Some problem with the computer?"

"No, sir. It's just stan—"

"Academy chickenshit, again. Emmy, if we ever lose the computer, we're dead. So don't waste your sweat taking precautions against it."

"But—"

"Shut up. How much margin do you figure to have? About a klick-second of delta-vee? At best?"

"Almost."

He pulled another cigar out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth, unlit. Even the Dutchman wasn't fool enough to smoke during a reentry; a bit of ash accidentally hitting me in the eye could mean me dumping the shuttle.

"Exactly," he said. "You're not good enough to pull a ground-to-orbit seat-of-the-pants rendezvous with just a klick-second margin. Nobody is. So don't worry about it, eh? That's why we have tell-me-a-hundred-times built into the astrogation module."

He turned to look at McCaw and Buchholtz, who were belted in their couches. McCaw sat back, his eyes half closed, while Buchholtz stropped his Fairbairn knife intently.

The Dutchman sighed. "Put the sticker away, Kurt; we're undocking."

Regretfully, Buchholtz gave the blade a quick buffing, then slipped it into its sheath.

"Quit stalling, Emmy," the Dutchman said. "According to the comp, we've got about three minutes to undock, or we have to wait an orbit." Norfeldt waved his cigar. "You're on. Let's see how hot a pilot you really are."

You don't use a joystick for point-to-point in space; I unshipped it, locking it into its socket with a solid
chick
,
then cracked my knuckles as I settled myself into my couch. I thumbed for some wing just for practice, and then gave each of the pedals a trial push.

"Stand by," I said. I armed and pushed the
undock
button, and then pulled my harness just a bit tighter as the shuttle
thunk
ed itself loose from the orbiter.

I used the attitude jets to kick us gently away, and waited, watching the orbiter move away. You
don't
want to fry your orbiter with the exhaust of the shuttle's main engines.

Slowly, slowly, it receded.

Enough. I turned the shuttle until the belly cameras and computer agreed with me that we were flying tail-first. You have to do that, in order for the engines to slow you enough so that you hit atmosphere. Of course, if you and the computer forget to flip it back over after the burn, you're dead.

"Here we go." I punched
program and
ignite.

It was magic time.

There are trickier propositions than dropping the shuttle portion of a Contact Service scout down to a planet's surface, but not many. Part of it is numbers—skin alloys can only go to a classified but finite temperature; braking spars and variwings can only take so much pressure—but a lot of it is feel.

Now, I'm not the greatest admirer of flight modules in copters and atmosphere-only fixed-wing craft—before the Academy, I spent a
lot
of time and money on bandit circuits—but for reentry variwings, they're an absolute necessity. At, say, Mach 25, just barely inside an atmosphere, an attitude change—usually adjustment of angle of attack—has to be done by attitude jet. The same change at Mach 2 is going to be a careful mixture of jet and elevon; at, say, four hundred klicks per hour it's going to be entirely elevon, and whatever it is will take much more elevon to do it.

Even a flier as good as I am can't make a smooth transition between using attitude jets and elevons the way the computer does. With fly-by-wire, any adjustment—say, bringing the nose down a couple of degrees while rolling to port to go into a bank—takes exactly the same movement of stick and pedals, and, with appropriate feedback,
feels the same.

Which lets the pilot pay attention to flying. And there's plenty to do. The trick is to try to get both low enough and close enough to the landing zone so that on landing you don't have to burn the engines one second longer than necessary—the juice may come in handy for getting back up to the orbiter.

If you miss the orbiter, no matter by how little, there's no recall, no matter how many tonnes of fuel are waiting for you up there.

In any case, flying isn't something I have to think about. I just do it—and I'm damn good. In less than an hour, the shuttle was safely down.

V

The Dutchman had been lying back in his couch, deliberately irritating me by pretending to be asleep, his hands folded over his massive belly, the cigar clenched in his teeth.

The shuttle settled down on its landing pods. I went into the powerdown sequence while Buchholtz deployed the weapons turret and manned the foamer—after a quick trip through an atmosphere, the heat shield tends to start any vegetation around the LZ burning, which can make one unpopular with the locals. Norfeldt's eyes sagged slowly open, and he brought up his lighter and lit his cigar with one hand while he opened the biogel port with the other.

"Anything, Kurt?"

"Negative, Al." Buchholtz sounded disappointed as he eyed his screens, swinging the weapons turret radar and camera a full three-sixty before he set it on auto. "We've got a quiet plain. Want to go to Yellow, anyway?"

"Shit, no."

Planetside, we're always on alert, but doctrine allows for the Team Leader to take us to Condition Yellow—a state of high alert—pretty much at his own whim. The disadvantage of Yellow is that it gives the weapons officer more discretion to fire without consulting, and I can imagine that Norfeldt wasn't eager to take the safety off Buchholtz.

By the way, going to Condition Blue, "Attack Expected," allows the WO to assume anything is hostile without further evidence, and as far as Buchholtz was concerned, I had the feeling that there wasn't much difference between Blue and Black; Condition Black is "Attack Initiated."

"You getting anything, An?"

McCaw's eyes were dreamy and distant. "Just . . . a vagueness on a vagueness, sir." He shrugged, then resumed his reverie.

"Any feelings of hostility?"

"No."

I was waiting for McCaw to say more, but he didn't.

The Dutchman spat. "Okay. We're about five klicks from the village, and if they didn't hear us come in, they're deaf. So we're going to play it conservative, and let them come to us while we wait for the biogel to spoil.

"Buchholtz, you get the recoilless out of the skimmer and mount it topside.

"Emmy, you and Ari launch a comm balloon; swing-mount the III-b radar on the all-purpose flange. I'll sit with the panic button.

"Let's get to it, people."

Deciding what to wear outdoors on a new world is easy; until developments in the biogel have had a chance to show us whether there are local airborne bugs or toxins that like human flesh, we always have to go through the full decontam protocol.

When there's a significant overpressure outside, we either have to accept breathing thicker air or go with hard helmets. While hard helmets do have an advantage—they
are
tough—doctrine is to prefer membrane helmets, and run just a bit of overpressure inside, which keeps them inflated. The membrane helmets aren't exactly easy to puncture, and they do have one big advantage: they conduct sound better than air, which means we can rely on the natural acoustics of our own ears, rather than external mikes. Much better.

I tightened my helmet to the rubbery collar of my E-suit and immediately thumbed on my suit air to push the clinging plastic off my face. Then, as per doctrine, I checked McCaw's seal while he idly checked mine.

He looked like a frankfurter in foil in his silvery E-suit; despite everything, it was all I could do to keep myself from giggling while we both donned our olive-drab oversuits and stepped out into the lock, him with the balloon and gear tucked under an arm, me with a wiregun slung over my shoulder and some sampling gear in a beltpack.

Despite Buchholtz monitoring the situation, and able to fire the recoilless in support, if necessary, it's always a good idea to have a bit of personal weaponry. Others like slugthrowers; I prefer wireguns. Back when I was a boy, I used to skitter a ball around our patio with the garden hose. Using a wiregun is a lot like that.

The inner door
snick
ed
shut behind us, and we stood in the airlock for a moment while the outer door wheezed itself open.

I put my hand on my belt and thumbed for the general freak. "Von du Mark here. Radio check. How—"

"Hey!" The Dutchman cut me off. "I've got a fucking
hangover.
Skip the tin-soldier stuff, Emmy, and just float the balloon, eh?"

McCaw followed me down the ladder onto the plain.

That's all it was, just a grassy plain. I felt vaguely disappointed, although I don't know what I'd expected. Some sort of eerie alienness, maybe. I probably shouldn't have expected anything. I'd been to Luna, of course, and had done practice landings on both Mars and Venus—the Mare Serentatis reminded me of the Schwarzwald; Mars was just a rocky field as far as the eye could see; Venus was like being inside a dirty cloud—but I guess I'd expected the first really alien world I landed on to look special.

It didn't.

While McCaw made ready to launch the balloon, I walked outside the broad black oval our belly jets had charred, took a sampler from my belt, then stooped to cut out and bag a piece of grassy turf. I stowed the bag in one of the shuttle's outside lockers, just above the black slickness of the heat shield.

There wasn't anything apparently special about the grass. The leaves were more purplish than I was used to, thinner and denser, but it was obviously just plain ordinary grass on a plain ordinary plain.

Big deal.

Since McCaw was finished tethering the plastic line to the shuttle, I opened the box containing the radar and took the white plastic ball out, snapping it onto the gondola's utility flange.

If there's anything simpler than flying point-to-point in space, it's launching a Service comm balloon. You just make sure that none of the lines leading to the electronics package are tangled, and that the line is in a normal-looking coil. Then you pull the ripcoard and stand back; it inflates and launches itself.

It was a huge, inverted plastic teardrop, falling upside down into the sky.

"Okay, radar's working, Emmy. You and McCaw get back in."

We waited in the airlock while the blue biocides rose up to our membrane helmets, eating away our olive-drab oversuits, leaving both of us in shiny E-suits and bubbles. The biocide fluid drained away, to be replaced by flickerings of UV and IR, and by both rinsings of water.

Stomping our boots and slapping at ourselves to shake off the last of the water, we went back into the shuttle and removed our helmets.

My first time on a really alien world, and it had been . . .

. . . nothing special. Not really. Just like a drill.

The Dutchman was still puffing away at one of his cigars. "The good news is that the biogel doesn't seem to be changing."

McCaw stripped off his E-suit and settled himself into his couch. He didn't take the bait; I guess anything going on outside of his own skull was too dull to bother with.

"Well?" Buchholtz asked, both eyes on his screens. "What is the bad news? I don't see anything."

The Dutchman sighed. "Neither do I. That
was
the bad news. Okay, we go to single watches. Sundown is in three hours; if we don't see anything in the night, first thing in the morning we take a hike." He sighed again. Sort of like a whale moaning. "Which means I'm on the wagon tonight. Shit. How much you want to bet nothing happens?"

I didn't say anything; I had a hunch that the Dutchman was right.

Sure enough, nothing much happened during the night. Buchholtz took first watch and spent the rest of the night sleeping in his couch, his headphones clamped on his head, the feedwire running into the radar alarm.

McCaw, being the comm officer, was exempt from being on watch; he spent the time in his cabin, no doubt communing with himself.

The Dutchman stood his watch without complaint, which surprised me. And apparently stayed sober, which surprised me more.

All that happened to me was that I got incredibly bored.

In the morning, we suited up.

VI

"Everybody got their bubbles on?" Another thing I hated about the Dutchman was his passionate need to ignore the obvious.

"I'd rather be wearing armor," Buchholtz said, giving a longing look at the armor locker as he tugged at the rubber seal that kept his inflated membrane helmet snug against the skin of his neck. "And taking the skimmer, for that matter."

I didn't blame him; I'd rather have been wearing full combat armor, too. But for different reasons:
I
would have wanted it for the added protection, not particularly for the extra weaponry. The wiregun pistol on my hip was enough for me. As far as the ground-effect skimmer went, the Dutchman had a point; if the shuttle had spooked the locals, the skimmer might, too.

The skimmer sat parked next to the shuttle, and each of us—except McCaw, of course—had a follow-me box that we could set off to call for the skimmer and its recoilless, as long as there was a cleared straight line between us and the skimmer.

"Don't worry about it." The Dutchman hitched at the Colt & Wesson point-forty-four Magnum revolver in his shoulder holster. Norfeldt turned up his nose at wireguns; he said he preferred the stopping power of an old-fashioned Glaser Safety Slug to the greater volume and rate of fire of a wiregun's two hundred silcohalcoid projectiles.

"I don't want to make us too hard to kill," he said. "That'd solve the problem, easy. No Fourth Team;
Magellan
would just fly through, drop the bomb, and fly back before it sealed the singularity."

Great.

"I'm ready, too, Major." If you exclude words like "check," "checkmate," "call," "raise," and "fold," that was a solid two percent of the words McCaw had spoken since I'd known him.

The Dutchman tapped at the hatch control panel. "Okay, children, it's show time."

In a few moments, we were all standing in the short purple grasses of the plain. My earphones hissed like a threatening rattlesnake. Sweating, I reached to the control box on my hip to turn up the squelch.

The air was hot, just not hot enough to require the more rigid suits, the ones with temperature control. Which made the job easier, at least in one sense. Unlikely as it was that any of the local bugs could bite us—and do us harm—through standard E-suits, if they
could,
that would "solve the problem," too.

There are times when I wish I'd gone to work for my father.

As blasé as I was trying to be, there was a certain something about being on a new world. The bounce in my walk as we headed away from the scout couldn't be accounted for just by the planet's low gravity—it was low only relative to Earth, not to freefall. After more than two weeks in zero gee, I should have been dragging; in fact, even after the three klicks from the shuttle to where the forest broke on the plain, I was still ready to break into a happy lope.

But it bothered me that we hadn't seen any locals yet. Once we were into the forest, the skimmer wouldn't be able to come when called. Not that there was a problem with the radio, but the autopiloting wasn't nearly good enough to work its way through a maze of trees.

A few hundred meters from the edge of the forest, McCaw started muttering to himself.

"Here we go, Kurt." The Dutchman's voice seemed distant, even though he was only a couple of meters away.

"Peeling off, Major." Buchholtz jogged away to our left, his assault rifle in one hand, a Korriphila 10mm pistol in the other. He was moving quickly across the plain; even though he was moving diagonally to our path, it was likely he would reach the stand of trees before we would.

"Contact, Major." McCaw didn't sound bored, for once. "They are about a quarter klick ahead, concealed in those columnar vegetable growths."

"Trees, Ari,
trees
."

For once I sympathized with Norfeldt. What else do you call ten-meter-high, three-lobed plants, covered with what looked like purple moss?

"Major, I
like
them."

I shot a look at McCaw, then caught myself. No, he wasn't armed. Comm officers are
never
armed. You can't trust an esper who is supposed to open himself to telepathic—and telempathic—communication with aliens.

"So you like them. Big deal; let's go meet the natives. Emmy, keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. Kurt, you on station yet?"

My earphones hissed as Buchholtz thumbed his communicator. The damn F9s put out enough RF to interfere with FM.

"Got them in my sights, Major."

I could barely make out the words through the interference. But Buchholtz's eagerness came through loud and clear.

The Dutchman caught it too. "You fire on my order
only
—you got that, Kurt?" Norfeldt liked repeating himself; he'd only given that order to Buchholtz and me a couple dozen times already.

"Got it."

The Dutchman stopped the three of us about twenty meters from the sharp edge of the forest with a sudden, chopping gesture of his left hand.

"Ari, just translate what I say. No unnecessary interpretation."

Three aliens walked out of a dark gap in the wall of trees, then took up positions facing McCaw, as though Norfeldt and I simply weren't there.

They were erect, bipedal creatures, tall and almost comically thin. Their purplish skin looked slick, but not wet. I could understand how First Team had described them as looking like amphibians, but we humans resemble lemurs more than they resemble salamanders. The orange splotches on their naked skin
could
have been natural pigmentation, I suppose, but the stochastic quasi-regularity of the patterns seemed to suggest dyes.

"They are . . . powerful, Major." I could barely hear McCaw. While Norfeldt was closer, he must have been having trouble hearing him, too; the Dutchman reached over and flicked a switch on the tall captain's belt.

"Just translate, Ari—easy, now. Easy now, boy."

The fact that the Dutchman was treating him like a dog would have bothered me more if McCaw hadn't been trembling all over like he
was
a scared puppy.

"T-they say: 'Greetings. We are the . . .' Untranslatable, Major, but it's their species name. Overtones of justice, and power, such power. . . . 'What we have, do, or are, it is yours.'"

"Ritual greeting?"

McCaw brought his gloved hands up in front of his face, the fingers awkwardly writhing, as though he wasn't used to having fingers. "There's a trace of ritual, but no, Major—they mean it."

The Dutchman snorted cautiously. "Sounds good. We'll—"

"But just for me and Buchholtz. They're waiting for a response from one of us."

"Just you two?"

"Wait." McCaw's trembling worsened, then ceased entirely. "Wait. They don't see you and Mark as people, just objects. Wait. The leader is . . . expressing admiration at my species' ability to create complicated . . . toys."

"Don't clarify matters for them. Have they seen other toys like me and Emmy before?"

"Wait. 'Yes. We admired greatly the toy that your . . . associates brought before. This time you have brought two. Is one a gift?'"

"What if it isn't?"

"Confusion. Wait. They don't understand the concept of not giving someone what he wants. They keep asking me to explain it another way. Wait. Wait."

I flipped the slipguard off my holster and let my hand rest on the hilt of my wiregun. The Dutchman caught the motion out of the corner of his eye.

"At
ease
, Mister von du Mark. We're all expendable—you most of all."

Which was why I'd flipped the guard off in the first place. I don't like being expendable. "Yes, sir."

"Relax, Emmy—I don't think I'll have to—" Norfeldt was cut off by the hissing of a wiregun, and then three quick gunshots. A muffled scream in our headphones was echoed off in the distance.

"Aie
—Condition Red—" Buchholtz trailed off into a bubbling moan, then went silent.

McCaw crumpled to the ground; I drew my wiregun and thumbed the safety off.

Norfeldt drew his Magnum and fired off a shot into the air, but the aliens didn't make a move. Not at all. They just stood there, breathing slowly, watching us with their round, liquid eyes. The Dutchman squatted next to McCaw, keeping his eyes on the aliens.

"He's breathing," the Dutchman said. "Emmy, move. Condition Blue; fire if threatened. I'll stay here with Ari. Find him." He dropped a hand to the follow-me hanging from his belt.

A distant
whoop whoop whoop
sounded in my phones as the skimmer started toward the Dutchman.

"On my way." That last was unnecessary; I was already sprinting for the area where Buchholtz had entered the forest, several hundred meters to the west.

In five minutes, I was standing over what was left of Buchholtz, who lay in the middle of a horrid shambles that looked like something painted by Hieronymus Bosch.

I'd never actually seen a dead man before. Or a dead alien. It wasn't pretty. The claws that had ripped his outer suit and E-suit to ribbons hadn't stopped there; they had opened up his chest and belly like they thought he was a box of Cracker Jacks and they needed the prize right away. Pink viscera mingled with red blood and the brown pulp of half-digested food. Slick with blood, his ribs stuck out of what was left of his chest.

They'd ripped his left leg off; I could see the hip joint—

There was a strange calm in my head, although not in my stomach.

The night terrors would come later. I forced myself not to vomit as I eyed the woods, and then sent a stream of wires hissing into the trees, just for good luck.

"Report, Mark. Dammit,
report
."

"Yelling won't help, Major." I leaned back against a tree, my eyes on the woods. "Buchholtz is dead. They . . . clawed him."

"Pictures."

"Yes, sir." Using my left hand, I took my holocam from my belt and started snapping, not using either my right hand or the viewfinder. Both my eyes and my right hand were occupied. "You see any weapons on your natives?"

"No."

"None on these, either. There's five—no, six—bodies scattered around the clearing." Buchholtz had given them a good fight. Trails of blood leading into the forest showed that it had taken more than these six filthy lizards to kill Kurt Buchholtz.

I stowed the camera, then stooped to check his weapons. "His rifle's empty." I slipped the magazine out of his automatic. "Major?"

"Yeah?"

"Did Buchholtz keep a round in the chamber?"

"Yeah. Five rounds left?"

"Yes, sir. Pistol's been fired three times." His Fairbairn knife was stained with dark-purple blood. "He made the bastards pay, Major." I cleaned his knife with a dirtclod, then raised it in a quick if sketchy salute. There wasn't anything else I could do for Kurt.

I wiped the rest of the blood off the knife and slipped it into my belt. Maybe I'd be having some use for it. I almost wished—

"Don't give with the bullshit bravado, kid. Just keep your head on. May be some injured ones around, some survivors. Lessee if we can't survive this one, which would be nice." The Dutchman just kept talking. I don't know whether it was to reassure himself or me. "C'mon back now; the skimmer'll be here in just a couple of minutes. And keep your eyes open, shithead. Take it easy, Emmy. Deep breaths. Get away from the—"

McCaw's voice cut in. He wasn't talking to me or Norfeldt, I'm sure. "Thank you. Please. If you could . . ."

"What the fuck? Ah,
no—Ari,
Ari.
Shit."
Norfeldt's voice was suddenly calm, even. "Not back here, Emmy. Meet me at the skimmer."

"But—"

"Take off in twenty minutes, if I don't meet you. I want the skimmer back at the shuttle ay-sap, fuckhead. If I don't make it, you're going to have to Drop this one, all by yourself. That's an order. Acknowledge."

I swallowed. "Aye aye, sir."

"One more thing before you go. Take a look at Kurt's face."

"Sir?" It was hidden by his bloody, deflated helmet.

"Shut up and look, Mister. Is he smiling?"

Using Buchholtz's Fairbairn knife, I cut the rest of the helmet away. It was hard work; membrane helmets are tough.

"So? Is he smiling, Emmy?"

It was hidden by the blood, but he was. I couldn't understand it. "Yeah."

"So's McCaw. And he's dead, too."