Starfist: A World of Hurt (32 page)

The scoot raised even more ash. Juliete looked back along the column. The last men in the gun squad were faintly visible almost to their knees, and the last men in second squad were visible to their waists.

He swore silently. The Marines' chameleons weren't going to provide them with much concealment if they ran into an enemy.

In some places, ash covered the ground to a depth of several centimeters; in others, the surface could be seen through a thin coating of the fiery residue. Ensign Zantith suspected those nearly clear spots must be where small clearings had been. He could have called data down from the string-of-pearls to compare the map of the valley before the fire with the positions of the thinly covered spots, but couldn't think of a possible threat related to them that would justify taking his attention from his men and their surroundings to make the check.

He wondered about the squiggly lines of darker, more granular ash that snaked for meters across the valley floor. They looked like they were made by someone pouring streams of water on the burning ground.

He did stop briefly to look at the first streamlet the platoon crossed. The water, clotted with suspended ash, was so viscous it barely flowed. He looked along the streamlet in its direction of flow and lost it to sight before he could see where it went underground. He would have liked to divert his platoon to follow the waterway, but his orders were strict, and he had a timeline to follow that didn't allow for a side trip. He wanted to know if ash buildup had blocked the flow where the water went underground. If it had, nobody traveling between the surface and the caves via those routes would be able to resurface until the ash plugs were broken.

Each waterway the platoon crossed was the same as the first--thick and sluggish with suspended ash. No matter where he looked, he was never able to see where one went. He saw no standing pools that would indicate a blocked entry to an underground stream.

Kilo Company's first platoon didn't encounter Skinks or anybody else in their trek across the undulating valley floor. It reached the small lake in good time.

Like the waterways, the lake was gray with ash, but noticeably less viscous. Other than some scorching, the growth on the island appeared untouched by the fire that had raged around the small lake. It seemed the lake itself was fed by an upwelling from underground, or at least no streams flowed into it in the stretch of bank that the Marines and the scientists could see from where they stood. Neither did water flow out anyplace they could see.

Lieutenant Brightly studied the island from the lakeshore. It sat a hundred meters away across the water. "Ensign," he said after he'd given the bank a quick scan, "I want to take a look at the other side before we go to the island."

Zantith had intended to send a squad on a circuit anyway, to check for enemy threat; if the xenobotanist wanted to go with them, that was fine.

"I'm sending a squad around the lake on a recon in force," Zantith replied. "You can accompany them. Just remember, until we get on the island and have it secured, we're in a tactical situation. That means when you go around the island, the squad leader is in command. If he says you can't stop someplace, you can't stop. If he says move, you move.

Understand?"

Brightly made a face. A navy lieutenant outranked a Marine sergeant, but he had to concede that Zantith was right--they were still tactical, even though the xenobotanist was certain there was no danger other than what nature provided, and he believed he was better qualified to deal with that than the Marines were. All he said, though, was, "I understand. I'll be a good boy and do what your sergeant says until you declare the island secured."

"Thank you," Zantith said, and meant it--if Brightly had objected, he would have refused to allow him to go with the squad when it went to scout the island's far side, and he didn't know the botanist well enough to know whether he'd try to make trouble over it later on. He checked the UPUD and saw that his platoon sergeant had already set one blaster squad and the gun squad in a defensive perimeter and left the other blaster squad aside for the recon. "Sergeant Kraeno up," he said into his command circuit.

In seconds the second squad leader joined him. Zantith shook his head; Kraeno was visible. His feet were solid gray, the color slowly fading as it climbed his legs and body until only the upper part of his helmet still had the full chameleon effect.

"I want you to take your squad and scout around the lake," Zantith told the squad leader.

"Take Lieutenant Brightly with you. The lieutenant understands you have command."

"Aye aye, sir," Kraeno replied. He looked at the width of the small lake and judged its circumference. "How long should I take?"

Zantith also looked at the lake. It was about four hundred meters across, and the map showed it to be almost circular. With the vegetation burned away his Marines could easily circumnavigate it in less than half an hour. But he wanted more caution than a slow amble would allow. "Give yourself an hour," he said.

That satisfied Kraeno; he thought an hour sounded about right. "Second squad, on me,"

he ordered into his squad circuit, and slid a sleeve up before he raised his arm for his men to home on.

Lieutenant Brightly was annoyed by the slow pace of second squad when they started off; after all, with all the ash clinging to their uniforms, the chameleon effect was pretty well negated, and they didn't need to move so slowly to avoid being seen. He didn't realize that the slow pace allowed them to thoroughly investigate their surroundings. But he was a navy officer, not an infantryman--he wasn't used to long walks, and the brief stop at the edge of the lake had been enough to let him notice how tired he was. It wasn't long before he was glad they were walking little faster than a crawl. Not even the brilliant greens, scarlets, pinks, ambers, and blues of the foliage on the island distracted him enough to ignore the aches in his muscles and soreness of his feet. By the time they reached the far side of the lake, what he mainly wanted to do was sit under a shady tree and rest for a while. But, other than those on the island, there weren't any trees, shady or otherwise, nearby. Brightly was so tired he barely remembered to watch the sides of the lake for streams.

There weren't any. Curious. He was no geologist, but knew enough about geology to know that running water had to come from someplace and go somewhere. Not only running water, but water in standing bodies.

"Can we stop here for a few minutes, Sergeant?" he asked.

Sergeant Kraeno looked around at the eerily gray landscape on which nothing moved except occasional breeze-driven ash devils. "Will five minutes be long enough?"

Brightly nodded, then remembered that, despite the thin coating of ash that covered his uniform, his head might not be visible, and said, "I think so, for what I want to do right now."

"Take five," Kraeno said into the squad circuit. "First fire team, twelve to three o'clock, second fire team, three to six o'clock. Third fire team, watch the island." Security taken care of, he asked, "What do you want to do, Lieutenant?"

"I want to look for currents." He waved a hand at the lake, his hand and arm coated with enough ash to be fully visible.

"Enjoy yourself, sir," Kraeno said.

The xenobotanist knelt at the side of the lake and leaned forward to study its surface. The water moved in gentle ripples, as in any other undisturbed lake he'd ever looked at. The ash was settling out of it, and the upper several millimeters looked clear, giving the lake a mother-of-pearl shimmer. He tilted his head this way and that, trying to detect the water's direction of movement, but it didn't seem to favor one direction more than any other. He looked at the ground he knelt on, saw a fragile flake that hadn't been turned to fine ash by the fire, and carefully slid his fingers under it and picked it up. He stretched his hand out a centimeter above the water and tipped it to let the flake slide off his fingers. The flake broke when it hit, but two of its pieces were large enough for him to easily watch. He knelt unmoving, his eyes on the two small flakes, until Sergeant Kraeno called for the squad to mount up and resume moving.

Except for slowly sinking as they became waterlogged, the two small flakes didn't move at all--he wasn't able to discern a current in the lake.

"Same-same," Sergeant Kraeno reported when the squad returned to the rest of the platoon--everything looked the same all the way around the island.

Lieutenant Brightly conferred with the other two members of the science team and told them of his experiment with the flake that failed to show a current.

Ensign Szelt, a hydrologist, had also tested the water for a current and hadn't found one.

She'd also tested water quality, and found it clear for the top six millimeters. "The only elevated salinity is in the polluted water," she concluded. "It appears that the water is clean enough to drink without purification--once you filter the ash out, that is."

Lieutenant Prang, the team's xeno zoologist, gave the lake a worried look. "There must not have been anything living in this water--there aren't any floaters," he said. Lieutenant Brightly looked at him, not understanding. Prang explained, "All that ash would have clogged the gills of any piscoids and suffocated them. Dead fish float, and there aren't any floating bodies. The samples I took didn't have any microbial life--or any other kind--either. Very odd." He shrugged. "We'll find out more when we get the samples back to the
Grandar Bay.

"

The three looked to the island. With its flashy colors and promise of cooling shade, it was inviting. Once they got there, Brightly would be fully in charge of the scientific mission--unless they found animals, in which case Lieutenant Prang would take over.

When the Marines looked at the island, they were less sanguine. They knew other Marines had gone into a very similar forest in that valley and were attacked. UAVs had been knocked out of the air and destroyed, and recon minnies had been destroyed on the ground.

The scientists might have been ready to search for new and fascinating life-forms to study, but the Marines were ready for a deadly fight and intended to come out of it the winners.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

According to the string-of-pearls, from where they stood the pond floor sloped gently and evenly from the bank to its lowest point, little more than a meter down. On the other side it climbed more abruptly to the island, but not so abruptly that they would have to crawl or climb instead of walking to the shore. What the string-of-pearls didn't show was whether the bottom was firm or soft--its sensor suite hadn't had time to check until after the fire; by then, the pond was filled with ash and it couldn't make the determination. Which also meant the string-of-pearls report on the pond's depth was suspect.

The scoot carried a float to ferry the scientists' equipment to the island. The original plan called for a squad to wade to the island and establish security, then for two more Marines to wade across, pushing the float ahead of them. Then the float would be drawn back and forth as needed via ropes attached fore and aft. But Ensign Zantith wasn't willing to risk any of his Marines to what might prove to be a quicksand bottom. The float had a carry rating of three hundred kilos, more than sufficient to carry two Marines, maybe even three, equipped with weapons.

"Sergeant Oconor up," Zantith ordered over the command circuit. The first squad leader joined him in a moment. "Get the float in the water and assign your three lightest men to take it across to the island. We don't know how firm the bottom is, so I want them to rest as much of their weight as possible on the float, just in case. Understand?"

Sergeant Oconor looked at the small lake and the island in its middle. "Yessir," he said.

"As soon as they've got the towline secured over there, I'll have the float pulled back and send more of your squad over with it. Questions?"

"Nossir, that's pretty clear."

"Do it."

"Aye aye." Oconor headed for the scoot. "First fire team, on the scoot," he ordered into his squad circuit as he walked. First fire team wasn't his three lightest men, but he didn't think they would swamp the float. Corporal Juliete and his men got to the cargo scoot at almost the same minute he did. The Marines hadn't packed it; that had been the responsibility of the scientific team. The scoot was loaded with small crates, and smaller parcels were lashed down on top of them.

"Lieutenant, which one of these crates contains the float?" Oconor asked the three navy scientists, all of whom were standing next to the scoot, discussing what they were going to do when they reached the island. Let them sort out which one he was talking to.

"What?" asked Lieutenant Brightly. "Oh, the float."

"It's in there." Ensign Szelt pointed with an ungloved hand, not that the Marines needed to see the bare hand at the end of her ash-coated sleeve to tell where she was pointing.

"Thanks. By your leave?" Oconor didn't wait for the officers to move out of the way before directing Juliete and his men to start unloading the scoot to get to the float. He had an intelligent layman's respect for scientists in most instances, but in the field, in a place where there'd just been significant fighting and he had no reason to believe there wasn't still danger from hostile forces, he saw scientists--even navy officers who were scientists--as nothing more than clueless civilians who would just get in the way and endanger lives when the shooting started.

"Hey, be careful with that!" Brightly yelped, and wrested a parcel away from Lance Corporal Rising Star. "That package has some delicate instruments in it." He carried the parcel several meters away from the scoot and gently laid it on the ground. By the time he turned back, Ensign Szelt and Lieutenant Prang were busily unloading packages with scientific instruments. Brightly joined them, and in moments all the smaller parcels that had been lashed to the crates were unloaded. Once most of the equipment was unloaded, Lieutenant Prang began setting up trid cameras to record the Marines' approach to the island. Ensign Szelt helped him. They also set up two 2-D vid cameras.