Gabriel's Redemption (15 page)

“Uh, yes sir. As soon as possible. I think we may have a security problem.”

The chairman paused for a few seconds, pondering what issues they could possibly have with security on an ice-bound planet two jumps from any civilized world. He turned back to the wallscreen. “Karr, I’ll catch up with you later,” he said, cutting the connection. “On my way,” he called over his shoulder to the comm as he walked from the room.

The chairman strode into Operations, a large room filled with workstations and walls lined with screens showing scrolling data or video views of various other sections of the colony. Several personnel were at work, even at the late hour. So hard at work, in fact, that the chairman saw that no one noticed his arrival, except for Vanheel who hurried over to him.

“Mister Chairman, thanks for coming down,” he said, extending his hand. The chairman took it and gave it a quick shake, then looked over Vanheel’s shoulder.
 

“Who’s that?” he asked, inclining his head towards a woman wearing environment gear, the still-damp outer jacket rolled down around her waist.

“Sir, that’s Marta, she’s one of our entry-level employees,” Vanheel answered. “She found the device.”

“Device?” the chairman asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Sorry, yes, I should have explained further,” he replied. “Here, I’ll show you.”

He led the chairman over to the central area of Operations, a raised platform able to overlook most of the workstations, where Marta stood. Marta straightened at the chairman’s arrival.

“Hello, Marta,” the chairman said. “Mind telling me what pulled me out of a board meeting, and why you’re dripping on my floor?”

Marta stiffened. “Sir, I’m sorry, it’s, uh, complicated,” she stammered. “I thought I should bring this to Mister Vanheel, ‘cuz he helped me with a situation I had…”

“Vanheel, you want to clue me in?” the chairman asked with a hint of exasperation.

“Right here,” Vanheel said, pointing to the large box sitting on the command center table. The chairman noticed it looked blurry, and blinked his eyes to try to clear the fuzz. “It’s got a cloaking system, an actual light bender, very advanced.”

“This is not ours, I’m assuming?” the chairman asked, still peering at the device.

“Not even remotely. This is far beyond what we can do here, and probably even beyond the capabilities of our backers.”

The chairman rubbed his chin. “This was outside?”

Marta spoke up, her confidence returning. “Yes sir, my coworker and I found it. It shot him,” she said, quickly adding, “But it’s deactivated now of course.”

“Shot? Like this is a weapon?” he asked.

Vanheel shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Looks like some type of sensor system, the weapon must have been defensive. It’s too small and underpowered to be an offensive weapon.”

Marta snorted. “Tell that to Witten,” she said under her breath.

The chairman ignored her, still staring at the device. “Take it apart, let’s see if we can find out where it came from, and why it’s here.”

“Absolutely sir,” Vanheel replied. “I just needed to run this past you. I was kind of hoping this was ours, some secret project you and the board had.”

The chairman shook his head. “Nothing I know of.” He turned to leave. “Keep me updated on the progress,” he said, heading for the door. “And you might want to send a few more people out to see if there are any more.”

Just as he reached the hatchway, he heard one of the personnel at a workstation he just passed announce, “Emergence at T-Gate.” The chairman paused and turned back to the young lady who spoke.
 

“Tell me about it,” he said as he leaned over her shoulder to look at her screen.

Caught off guard, she stammered, “Uh, Mister Chairman, sorry. Uh, the gate station just detected a Cherenkov flare at the wormhole.” She tapped at a few keys, reading her screen. “No ship sighted, no broadcast tags. Just typical cometary mass, happens all the time.”

The chairman straightened up.
Cometary mass
, he repeated to himself.
Happens all the time
. He looked back at Vanheel, who was turning the device over and looking at it with Marta. Something clicked in his mind.

“Vanheel!” he called out, the Operations manager looking up from the device. “Put out the word to everyone. Prepare for company, and I don’t think they’re friendlies.”

Chapter 16

“Drop in five, four, three, two, one…DROP, DROP, DROP!”

Gabriel’s head was slammed back against the padded wall of the drop capsule, known to drop-troopers as coffins, as the
Marcinko
spat the team from the drop bay like bullets. Nine capsules shot towards the surface of Poliahu at over seven G’s.

After the initial shock, Gabriel relaxed his breathing and had his neuretics bring up the drop data in Mindseye. Nine green dots, falling towards the surface at over 18,000 miles per hour, all secure telemetry in order. He checked for an update of the LZ, and confirmed the team was on target and all probes showed the same quiet colony.
All but one probe,
he thought.
I only hope that was a glitch.

He noticed one dot slightly off target, double checked that it was Sabra, and reconfirmed her flight path was taking her to the predetermined LZ at the base of the ridge. One more green dot was wavering. He sent a quick burst to Jimenez to adjust course, and his dot came back in line within a few seconds.

Gabriel adjusted his course slightly, tiny hydrazine jets on the outside of the coffin giving a few quick puffs. He wanted to land just outside the circle of his team to not only get a closer look at the colony upon landing, but also to be able to see Sabra better as she landed. He still wasn’t sold on her loyalty; something with her and Lamber still simmered below the surface, and he planned to make a point of keeping a very close eye on them planetside.

They began entering Poliahu’s atmosphere, Gabriel’s coffin buffeted by the ionized air molecules screaming past his falling capsule. The heat inside rose by several degrees as friction took hold, and he ordered the battlesuit he wore to lower its temperature a bit to compensate. His nose itched something fierce, but in his standing position with arms locked at his side, he couldn’t do anything about it. Not to mention the combat helmet would prevent it anyway.
Standing upright, paralyzed, in a coffin. Great way to start the day.

The buffeting increased to a shudder and Gabriel’s teeth rattled. A quick check of the drop data showed them just a few seconds from retroburn, so he clamped his jaw and gritted his way through the shaking, hoping his recent filling stayed in place.

As one, the nine capsules reached their IP, ejected their heat shields with a bang, and activated the retroengines. Light blue tongues of plasma fired from the three conical jets on the bottom of each capsule as their heat shields fluttered away above them. Gabriel felt a massive squeeze in his chest and his blood began pooling in his legs, vision graying, as the g-forces of the burn took hold. Slowly the pressure decreased and he took a few deep breaths, checking data once again.

The capsules were all on target, Sabra just north of the others, as they all slowed their descents to a more manageable landing velocity. Twenty seconds to touchdown, he noted, so he began activating the armor’s servos and sensors, bringing the Otero battlesuit fully online. Heads-up displays illuminated his visor, the first bit of light he had seen since entering the capsule over an hour ago. The suit ran through diagnostics, everything in order he saw with satisfaction, and he tensed his leg muscles in anticipation of touchdown.

Gabriel’s retroengine rose in pitch, then abruptly shut off, and his capsule banged into the surface of the icy planet. The shell of the capsule split vertically and spread the doors wide, allowing the weak pre-dawn glow to enter. Gabriel quickly hopped from the capsule, taking several steps away, knowing full well how many men and women had been injured when the eight foot tall capsule had tipped over on them as they emerged.

He turned back to the capsule to see it still standing upright, steam billowing from its underside as the engines ticked and cooled. He stepped back to the capsule, sent a command, and its doors swung shut again. He pushed it over backwards and it toppled into the snow, exposing the blackened engine nacelles and a puddle of water that was quickly refreezing.
 

He turned back towards the ridge to catch a glimpse of Sabra’s capsule touching down near the base in a cloud of snow. He checked the data and his heads-up displayed her capsule landing safely and opening.
Good
, he thought. Hers was an important position, and he didn’t want to waste time trying to compensate for a bad drop. Although it did appear she may have landed a bit too close to the valley entrance.

Walking around to the top of his capsule, he reached down, and with the enhanced servos in his battlesuit, grabbed the tow handle built into the top of it and began dragging it to their rally point, leaving a furrow in the snow behind him that began immediately filling back in with falling snow.
 

“Did you see something?”
 

The two men were sitting in Diji’s cafeteria, having an early morning coffee. The one who had spoken pointed out the window.

“No, I’m facing the other way, jackwagon,” replied the other, his eyes barely open.

The first man stood up and went to the window, the dimly-lit landscape barely visible through the iced windows. “Thought I saw a shooting star,” he said.

The tired man grunted. “Maybe you shouldn’t have had that last margarita last night, eh?”

“You’re the one who drank the last one, remember?” he asked as he stood at the window, still peering out. “But I swear, it looked like a star, or a meteor or something, headed for Solsbury Hill.”
 

“Keep your voice down,” the other replied. “My head is pounding. Just tell the shift boss when you report. No biggie, probably another falling satellite. Nothing works around here anymore…” his voice trailed off as his eyes closed and his head dipped.

He turned away from the window and shrugged. “Whatever. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” He walked over to the dispenser and refilled his coffee.

The team, less Sabra, reached the rally point where the gear capsule had touched down, each of them dragging their own capsule behind them. Brevik was already at work opening the unmanned one and doling out the equipment for each person.

Takahashi was wearing his project, as everyone had taken to call it, and accepted another ruck of batteries. St. Laurent took one of the personnel restraint cases and strapped it to her back; Sowers did the same with the second. Jimenez gladly took the extra weapons, while Lamber clipped on ammo cases to his suit’s rear mounts, grumbling. Gabriel took two smaller cases, each containing hand weapons, and another case of batteries. Brevik, by far the largest of the team, had Jimenez help him strap two heavy assault plasma cannons to mounting points on his armor’s back, then added several extra cases of plasma ammo to his waist mounts.

The team sent commands to the capsules, switching on the visual cloaking, and one by one the cold coffins faded into the snow. Brevik closed the gear capsule and did the same to it. Fully loaded, they began moving out towards their target.

With sunrise still almost an hour away, the chairman strode into Operations, where Vanheel waited.

“What do we have?” the chairman asked, ignoring the stares from the morning shift.

“We’ve got nothing, sir,” Vanheel replied. “But again, we don’t have top of the line sensors, as you know. We’re pretty much flying blind here. All we have is your hunch.”

The chairman glared at him. “My hunches are what have kept this colony functioning, and kept you employed. Remember that,” he said firmly as he looked around the room. “Do we have any visuals of anything out of the ordinary?”

Vanheel shook his head. “No, and we probably won’t for quite a while. The storm that came in yesterday is blowing hard and will be sticking around for at least three more days.”

The chairman walked over to a tech sitting at a workstation who was looking up at him with a frown. “Son, is there a problem?”

“No, sir, not really, uh,” the tech stammered. “It’s just that, well, one of my subordinates said he saw a meteor come down nearby an hour ago. I mean, it’s probably nothing,” he said, shrugging. “And he was out late last night, so…”

“Where?” the chairman asked, cutting him off.

“Where? Uh, well I guess he was playing cards at Rita’s, where everyone goes late night. It’s the place near…”

“No,” the chairman said sharply. “Where did he see the meteor come down?”

The tech looked at Vanheel questioningly. “Go ahead, Peckens, spit it out,” Vanheel said.

Peckens turned back to the chairman. “Near the foot of Solsbury,” he said, letting out a breath.

The chairman turned and walked back over to Vanheel. “Get some people stationed outside with comms and weapons. This is no hunch.”

“But sir, we hardly have any weapons,” he replied, turning his palms up slightly.

“Then get them rocks and clubs, dammit,” the chairman replied angrily. “I’m not about to lose everything we’ve worked for without a fight.”

Chapter 17

The team trudged on in silence. Their battlesuits’ active camo blended them into the snow and ice. Not for the first time, Gabriel thanked whatever weather gods existed on Poliahu for the snowstorm. It didn’t affect their mobility in the armor, but it definitely added an extra layer of concealment to their camouflage systems. Looking left and right, Gabriel was hard-pressed to pick any other team member out of the blowing flakes, even though his heads-up showed them each twenty feet apart in standard armor approach formation.

He had ordered all communications between team members to be low-power neuretics bursts, and only for extreme urgencies, but the silence was starting to wear on him. After an hour loaded in the coffins in the drop bay, another half hour of drop, followed by over an hour of marching across the surface, he was even looking forward to hearing just a few notes from Jimenez’s guitar.