Solfleet: The Call of Duty (44 page)

He spread
his limbs to slow himself down again, to minimize the impending jolt.

“
Five
seconds.
”

He waited.

“
Three,
two...
”

He braced
himself.

“...
one...
”

A single
beep sounded briefly in his ear, signaling his parachute’s deployment, and less
than two seconds later his harness jerked him up hard as the parachute snapped
open.

He looked up
at the rectangular black canvas, visible in the darkness as little more than an
area devoid of stars, and then captured the steering handles that swung around
just above either side of his head. He peered down past his feet at the
approaching treetops, which blended together to form a heavy black carpet. A
veteran of more than a dozen jungle jumps, he knew all too well that once he
fell below their cover he’d be plunged into utter blackness, flying blind. If
he was going to crash into any branches, he wanted to hit them as softly as possible.
So, just seconds before the jungle swallowed him up, he put his feet together
and yanked down hard on the steering cords, slowing his decent significantly.

He plunged
through the canopy as though it were only a cloud, the whisper of leaves and
slender twigs brushing and scraping against him the only sound, but the world
around him grew suddenly blacker than he could possibly have imagined—blacker than
any jungle he had ever jumped into before. He couldn’t even see his own hands beside
his head. More abundant leaves rustled and thicker twigs snapped as he dropped through
them, but at least he was managing to avoid any large branches...so far anyway.

“Ground,”
someone warned.

Dylan yanked
down on the cords as hard as he could and gently touched down onto the soft jungle
floor. He ran a few steps to keep from falling until he slowed himself down, but
then his chute caught on something and yanked him backwards. He turned into the
breeze, slapped his harness release, and pulled it off, then pulled his chute
down out of the trees. Then he knelt down and spoke quietly into his pin mike.

“Any
injuries?” he asked. No one responded, which of course was exactly what he’d
been hoping for. “Okay, good. By the numbers.”

Everyone
counted off by their permanently assigned numbers. Then they waited for the
next several minutes, silent, unmoving, listening intently to their
surroundings for any indication that they had been detected.

Once Dylan felt
satisfied that all was safe, he gave the order to assemble and prepare, and in
less than two minutes the squad was ready to go. He snapped his helmet’s
night-vision display down into place only to find that the dense canopy was
filtering out too much starlight, without which the display was useless, so he
quickly retracted it again. Then he locked a magazine into his assault rifle, activated
its power pack, and gave the order to move out.

At first
their trek was slow and precarious, through a forest as thick and as black as
road tar. They traveled in relative silence using the faint sounds of each
others’ careful footfalls to maintain their proper intervals, because bunching
up could be a fatal mistake. But every once in a while someone walked into a
low-flying tree branch or took a bad step and a rather solid sounding thud or
the cracking and rustling of the underbrush broke that silence. Occasionally,
an emotional yet carefully subdued curse followed those thuds or cracks or
rustles, and with each one of those Dylan made a mental note to tack another
five minutes onto the next noise and light discipline training class.

As the hours
passed and the larger of Cirra’s moons slowly rose into the heavens, its glow
began to filter down through the thinning ceiling of foliage in ghostly rays.
So, too, did the level of nervous anticipation among the squad members rise
until it seemed to permeate the air. They all felt it, Dylan included, and they
all knew it. But they knew also that they would overcome it, just as they had
so many times before.

At least now
their night-vision displays would work the way they were meant to. Without
bothering to give the word—he knew his troops didn’t have to be told—Dylan
flipped his NVD into place over his eye. Through its dark amber-green lens, the
forest took on an eerie, haunted appearance, and a feeling of foreboding
suddenly filled the depths of his very soul. That feeling grew more intense as
they drew steadily closer to their objective, but he kept that to himself. He
wasn’t just one of the Marines. He was the squad sergeant. He was their leader.
History was replete with battles that had turned tragic when those in command
let their troops learn of their own misgivings and he wasn’t about to lead his
squad into that kind of situation. No. It was vital that he keep any feelings
of fear or doubt to himself.

A brilliant,
blinding light suddenly flooded the forest. The Marines instinctively dove and
rolled for cover and froze wherever they happened to land.

Several
seconds later, when he felt sure they hadn’t come under attack, Dylan quietly
asked, “Everyone’s eyes all right?” Too many times in the past, sudden flashes
of bright light had literally burned unwary soldiers’ optic nerves when their
NVDs’ light dampeners kicked in a split second too late and they were too slow
to close their eyes. And while it was true that biotronic implants had been
used to restore sight to most of them, there had been an unfortunate few who’d
been permanently and irreversibly blinded.

Fortunately,
no one responded to Dylan’s question this time. He allowed himself a brief
moment to quietly thank God for that, then got back to the task at hand.

“Ortiz, scan
the area.”

“Coming
right up,” she responded quietly. She pulled her virtually noiseless and
lightless tactical hand-scanner from her belt pouch, activated it—only a tiny
point of dim green light confirmed that it was operating—and quietly pivoted in
place a full three hundred sixty degrees, searching the surrounding woods for
energy emissions that might indicate the presence of any sort of
motion-detection or other early warning equipment.

“Nothing’s showing
up on the scanner, Sarge,” she reported. “As far as I can tell, we didn’t trip
any kind of perimeter security system or anything like that.”

“All right.
Everyone stand by.”

The Marines
remained still and silent. After what Dylan judged to be about a minute—no doubt
one of the longest minutes in mankind’s history of recording time’s passage—he
heard a ground vehicle approaching from the distant rear. Given the hilly
terrain and the soft forest floor, a troop carrier or other armored vehicle
would likely have been tracked rather than wheeled. No telltale squeals of
track joints echoed through the night and he felt no teeth-rattling vibrations
that such a vehicle’s incredible weight would inevitably have sent rumbling through
the ground, so the vehicle approaching their rear was likely nothing more than
a passenger car or light truck.

As it grew
closer, the spotlight that had nearly blinded them all tracked to the right,
away from their positions, plunging them back into darkness. The vehicle passed
by them not more than fifty meters to the right and continued on ahead, only to
stop about a hundred meters farther up, judging from the sound.

Marissa
confirmed the distance with a quick scanner reading and at Dylan’s order they
moved, ever so slowly, crawling forward through the sparse brush like a pride
of lions moving in on their prey until they had drawn close enough to see their
objective.

There, situated
in the center of a large clearing, was the reason for the camouflage screen the
orbiting starcruiser had detected. Judging by the size of the large solid wall
that appeared to completely surround it, the compound was much larger than Intelligence
had reported. Perhaps that camouflage screen wasn’t so inefficient after all.

Marissa
scanned the wall, intending to report its overall size, but felt disturbed by
what she found. “Wait a minute,” she quietly mumbled over the comm-link. “That
can’t be right.”

“What’s
wrong?” Dylan asked.

“It’s the
wall. According to my scanner, most of it isn’t even there. Upwards of
eighty-five percent of it just doesn’t show up.”

Dylan could
think of only one explanation for that, but it seemed so unlikely that he had a
hard time believing he could possibly be right. “It can’t be bolamide,” he commented
aloud. “Not here. Not that much.”

“It has to
be bolamide,” Marissa countered. “Doesn’t it?”

“Are you
sure your scanner is working right?”

“It’s
picking up everything else normally enough.”

Dylan had to
stop and think for a minute. Bolamide was an unusual element that, when
properly processed, didn’t show up on any but the newest, most powerful and
sophisticated of high-intensity shipboard scanners. Anything less, particularly
anything as compact as a hand-scanner, and an object made of bolamide would
appear exactly as Marissa had just described—as though it weren’t even there.
But these days large veins of bolamide were only known to exist deep within the
planets of the Boshtahr system—a star system nearly half a dozen light-years
away that had been under Veshtonn control for more than twenty years. Few
deposits of that rare ore had ever been found locally—not that finding them was
all that easy—and according to the publicized reports, those that had been
found were too small for anyone to bother trying to mine.

So how in
the galaxy had a group of Sulaini terrorists gotten their hands on enough of it
to build that wall?

As though
she’d been reading his mind, Marissa commented, “It must have been left over
from when the Veshtonn occupied this system. Where else could it have come
from?”

“Yeah. Must
have been,” Dylan responded, not totally convinced that was in fact the case.
After all, if true, then why would they have left such a valuable resource
behind?

After about
a minute the vehicle pulled forward into the compound and the spotlight at the
top of the wall went out. Darkness returned to the thick of the forest, but the
moonlight left both the compound itself and the surrounding clearing
dangerously illuminated. Closing in without being seen was not going to be
easy.

“Disengage
night-vision if you haven’t already,” Dylan instructed as he retracted his own device
up into his helmet. “Let’s do this thing right and go home. Take up your
positions and prepare for act one.”

The squad dispersed.
Dylan watched and waited for his vision to readjust to the natural ambient
light as Marissa selected a tree and started to climb.

She reached
the top of the tree in what she figured to be record time, then took out her
binocs and focused on the inside of the compound. “I can see over the wall from
here,” she quietly reported. “It completely surrounds the compound. Layout is
confirmed. It’s exactly as Intelligence reported, except for the spacing
between the buildings. That’s about ten to fifteen percent greater. I see one
guard in each of four corner towers, each with an individual weapon. Strictly
small arms. Two more guards with the guy on the spotlight, manning some kind of
heavy crew-served weapon I don’t recognize. There’s also one guard walking the
wall, going from tower to tower. The rooftops look clear. The guard at the
exterior checkpoint appears to be all alone. I’m not sure he’s even awake.”

“No one on
the outer perimeter?” Dylan asked.

“No heat
signatures on infra-red at all. Not even a little bunny rabbit.”

Dylan
considered what such a lack of perimeter security could imply. “They’re either
foolishly over-confident, which is highly unlikely, or they’re expecting us,”
he said. “What do you think, Corporal?”

“I think you
could’ve kept that last part to yourself, Sarge,” Ortiz commented.

“Sorry. Can
you see that vehicle?”

“Affirm. It’s
parked in front of a small building in the center. Standard Sulaini design
would dictate that to be the commander’s office. There’s no one around it that
I can see.”

“All right...”

“Wait a
second. There is someone, but not by the vehicle. Looks like another guard
posted by the door to one of the other buildings. That building itself is
surrounded by a tall chain-link fence and does not have any windows. Looks just
like a stockade to me, Sarge. I think we might have just found our objective.”

“Good work,
Corporal.” He considered the ominous lack of any perimeter security again. The
Caldanran Unity Front wasn’t just some ragtag mob of angry Sulaini citizens. It
was a well-trained, battle-hardened, paramilitary terrorist force with a well
established and well organized command structure. Its members would never have
overlooked something so basic as perimeter security in an area they considered
to be hostile, and he didn’t believe for a second that they considered any part
of Cirra to be anything
but
hostile to them.

“Ortiz,
switch to ultra-violet. Look for a security grid.”

“Stand by.”
She thumbed the ‘mode’ switch, and a violet-blue triple-beam energy barrier
instantly popped into existence near the edge of the wood line. So bright was
its sudden glow at that first moment before the binocs adjusted themselves that
it seemed almost as if someone had fired three lasers directly across her line
of sight.

“Bingo,
Sarge,” she said. “I’ve got triple U-V light beams running horizontal and
parallel to each other, approximately one, three, and five feet above the
ground. The grid appears to surround the compound wall about eight to ten
meters out. Looks like it originates from the guard shack by the main gate.”

“Standard
Sulaini military design again,” Dylan commented.

“Probably
just stolen from the Sulaini military, don’t you think?” she asked, a hint of
real reluctance finding its way into her voice.