Terms of Enlistment (35 page)

“You think it’s something they did, sir?” one of the Versailles’ lieutenants asks the XO. He looks at his subordinate and lets out a barking laugh that makes me flinch.

“No, Lieutenant Benning. I think someone accidentally nudged the thermostat on the main atmospheric exchanger.”

He looks around at the mixed group of civilians and Navy personnel watching him, and shrugs his shoulders.

“Well, folks, it looks like someone else grabbed the deed to this place, and we just got our eviction notice.”

The XO sends us out in teams to take stock of the station’s supplies. Even with the personnel we brought, there’s enough food and water to last for months. Between their stores and the small arms locker on the drop ship, we can arm everyone in our group to the teeth and keep them fed and sheltered until the relief ship gets to Willoughby. One thing we didn’t bring, however, is enough oxygen to keep everyone breathing once the air on this planet goes bad.

“What do we have for transportation?” the XO asks when we gather in the mess hall again to compile the inventory.

“There’s a half dozen cargo mules in the shed outside, and two ultralights,” Halley reports.

“How do you get to the main base and back?” Commander Campbell asks the administrator, a lanky, gray-haired man named Hayward who looks like he spends most of his time working outside with his hands.

“Puddle jumper,” he replies. “Atmospheric shuttle from Willoughby City. Comes out twice a month, or by request if there’s a medical issue our doc can’t fix.”

“That’s a long ride,” Halley says. “That place is, what, three thousand klicks south?”

“Twenty-eight hundred. Six hours each way, if the weather’s good.”

“Take us two weeks to drive with these mules, even if we could carry enough fuel to make the trip,” the XO says. Mr. Hayward shakes his head.

“You’d never get there. There’s a mountain range and an ocean strait between here and there.”

“Well, shit,” the XO says. “Looks like we’re waiting out the cavalry right here, then.”

“You got any fuel stores at all?” Halley asks Mr. Hayward. “I mean, other than the juice for the mules and those ultralights.”

“There’s a tank buried by the landing pad. That one’s full of JP-101AA. It’s for the puddle jumpers. They usually carry enough for a round trip, but we have some anyway, just in case. Five thousand gallons.”

“JP-101AA,” Halley repeats.

“Yeah. Atmospheric aviation. Can your ride use that stuff?”

“Those are multifuel engines,” she replies. “We’ll have less thrust, and we’ll need to stay in atmo, but yeah, they’ll burn one-oh-one.”

“We don’t have a refueller,” Mr. Hayward says. “Just a portable manual pump. It’ll take forever to fill that monster.” He looks out of the window, where the drop ship is visible a few hundred feet away. “How much fuel does one of those hold, anyway?”

“Twenty-one thousand eight hundred and forty-four pounds,” Halley replies without missing a beat.

One of the techs lets out a low whistle.

“That’s damn near forty-five hundred gallons,” he says to Mr. Hayward. “Looks like we’re getting cleaned out with one fill-up.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Mr. Hayward replies and turns off the portable terminal in front of him. “I have a feeling there’ll be little demand for that stuff around here by the end of the month.”

The refueling takes four hours, even with a dozen people working on the process. Trying to fuel a Wasp-class drop ship with a manual pump and fuel hoses with non-standard coupling is like trying to fill a bathtub by wringing out wet towels over it. We all take turns holding open the fuel ports on the upper hull of the Wasp by hand, and feeding the wrist-thin hoses of the little emergency hand pump system directly into the sealed tanks. By the time the tanks are full, we all smell like aviation fuel, even the XO.

“So, the bird is full,” Commander Campbell declares when we gather in the mess hall again. “We’ll be going down to see what’s going on at Willoughby City. I’d rather not take everyone along for this, just in case we run into trouble.”

“No argument,” Mr. Hayward says. “We’re not military. We’d just be baggage to you guys.”

“I suggest we go light,” Halley says. “I’ve never flown this thing with atmo fuel in it, so I have no idea how much she’ll lift, anyway.”

“What if you run into trouble, sir?” Corporal Schaefer asks. “You may want some rifles on the ground when you get there.”

Commander Campbell shakes his head.

“Not likely, Corporal. Let’s be realistic--if that colony’s gone, the bad guys have more firepower than we can handle, and the four of you aren’t going to make any difference. I’d rather be able to make a quick exit without having to worry about getting your guys down safely, too.”

“Understood, sir,” the corporal says.

“Lieutenant Adams, you’re in charge while I’m gone. If we lose comms, and we’re not back in twelve hours at the most, you are to stay holed up and wait for the rescue ship to arrive, is that clear?”

“Aye-aye, sir,” the lieutenant replies. “Stay put and wait for the cavalry.”

“Corporal Schaefer, you and your men will unload the drop ship’s armory and supply lockers while Ensign Halley does her preflight. Just leave us three rifles and a launcher, in case we end up having to put down in the boonies. I don’t want all that hardware going to waste if they blot us out of the sky.”

“Copy that, sir. We’ll get right on it.”

“Very well.” The commander claps his hands again. “Let’s get this show on the road, people.”

“Here we go again,” Halley says as we strap into our seats in the cockpit once again. The engines are warming up, but their drone sounds different now, lower and rougher than before.

“Make sure those straps are tight,” she advises. “If we have to bail out, you don’t want to slip out of your harness on eject.”

“That would be bad,” I agree. “Now would you stop talking about ejecting out of this thing? I’m not too keen on adding a parachute ride to my list of new experiences today.”

“Oh, those are kind of fun,” Halley says. “In a white-knuckled terror sort of way.”

I watch as she goes through her pre-flight checklists, at a more leisurely pace than back in the Versailles’ hangar a few hours ago.

“Okay, board’s green. We’re looking good. Are you strapped in back there, Commander?”

“That’s affirmative,” the XO replies over the intercom. “Take us up whenever you’re ready.”

Halley seizes her throttle and stick, and a few moments later, we are hovering above the landing pad. She waggles the tail of the ship left and right cautiously to test the control surfaces. Once again, I am amazed at how agile such a huge, ugly machine can be.

“Here we go,” she says, and increases thrust. “Stinger Six-Two is back in business.”

Soon, we are once again cruising twenty thousand feet above the rocky surface of the peninsula.

“Give me the bearing for the settlement again,” Halley says. I check the satellite map on the admin deck.

“Willoughby City is at bearing one-seven-niner from the terraforming station, distance two-eight-two-one nautical miles.”

“Give me the coordinates, please.”

I read off the satellite coordinates, and she plugs them into her navigation console.

“There. Now the computer in this bird knows where we’re headed. Makes me feel a little better about going back into
that
.”

She points at the windshield, and the huge storm cell that’s blanketing the continent ahead.

Without the ability to go into space, the drop ship is merely a huge, inefficient aircraft. Halley is not happy with the way the ship behaves with the inferior fuel in its tanks.

“This thing feels like someone put in a governor,” she says when we are crossing the mountain range mentioned by Mr. Hayward earlier. “I’m having trouble just getting up to twenty thousand feet, and I’m getting four hundred knots airspeed. We should be almost twice as fast.”

“Better than walking, though,” I say.

“Barely. I feel like I’m transporting a hold full of rocks.”

On the way to the central settlement, Halley picks up more emergency locator beacons from stranded escape pods. By now, we’re back above severe weather, and even though Halley broadcasts our presence every few minutes on the emergency channel, nobody on the ground is answering. Halley reads out the coordinates of the downed pods as they pop up on her TacLink screen, and I enter them into the satellite map on my admin deck. None of the pods are closer than a hundred miles from our flight path, and the XO tells Halley not to divert the ship when she asks him over the intercom.

“They have supplies and commo gear,” he says. “I don’t want to fill this bird up with hitchhikers and end up killing everyone. Besides, we don’t have the fuel. They’ll be okay until the rescue ship gets here.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” Halley replies.

The storm clouds cover the planet like a funeral shroud, denying us a view of whatever is roaming the surface. Some species is taking over the planet, transforming it to fit their needs, and we won’t find out what we’re facing until we descend into the dark maelstrom below to put our fragile selves right among them. I feel like a little kid who has just been tasked by his parents to venture into the monster-filled basement for an unimportant errand.

I’ve lost track of our time aloft when Halley finally points the nose of the ship at the angry-looking clouds below.

“Get ready for some bounce,” she tells us. “We’re fifty miles out. I’m going lower to see if I can get a fix on the AILS beam.”

I watch with dread as we descend toward the clouds, where sporadic flashes of lightning illuminate the dark sky. As soon as we enter the clouds, the ship gets buffeted again, but this turbulence doesn’t feel as severe as the violent winds we encountered on our first descent through the storm.

“Willoughby Control, this is Navy flight Stinger Six-Two,” Halley transmits. “We’re four-niner miles north, inbound for AILS landing.”

There’s nothing but static in return, and Halley repeats the broadcast twice before giving up with a shrug.

“All their nav gear is up and running. I can see the radio beacon and the AILS beam. Whatever happened down there, they still have juice.”

When we break through the cloud cover, the ground isn’t quite as close as it was when we picked up the XO earlier. The rain has slacked off to a drizzle. When Halley levels off the ship, we’re two thousand feet above the ground, and I can see half a mile into the distance.

“Weather’s getting better,” Halley says. “Looks like we may not even need the AILS.”

I crane my neck to look at the ground below, trying to spot the alien beings that ought to be easy to see even from this altitude, but there’s nothing moving down there. The landscape looks as boringly monotone as the rocky plateaus and hills back by the outpost.

“Thirty miles out,” Halley declares. “Nothing going on down there. I have zip on radar and infrared.” All I see ahead is the radio beacon.”

“Stay sharp,” the XO says over the intercom. “First sign of trouble, you get us back up above the soup.”

“Oh, don’t you fucking worry about
that
,” Halley mutters under her breath without toggling the transmit button on her stick.

The town that pops out of the misty haze half a mile in front of us looks untouched. As we get closer, I can see rows of pre-fabricated buildings, lined up on a neat grid of concrete mesh roads. The administrator back at the terraforming station called this settlement Willoughby City, but that title seems grandiose.

Halley makes a high pass above the settlement, banking the Wasp into a tight spiral turn to get a look at the ground. I peer past her through the thick armored glass of the starboard canopy, but I see nothing out of the ordinary. The houses and roads look undamaged. I can see lights on many of the buildings.

“Looks fine to me,” Halley says. “Let’s go a little lower and take a closer look.”

We make another pass over the city, this time much lower and slower than before. This time, I notice something else down below, something that wasn’t obvious from almost two thousand feet up. There are people down there after all, but they’re not reacting to the drop ship overflying the settlement at low altitude. They’re lying on the concrete latticework of the road grid, slumped up against the walls of the buildings, or face down on the ochre-colored dust of the ground between the houses. Most of them are lying on the ground alone or in pairs, prone on their stomachs or flat on their backs, as if the entire colony decided to take a collective nap at the same time. My mouth is suddenly very dry, and I can feel my heart hammering in my chest. When I look at Halley, I see that she is biting her lower lip as she’s watching the scene below.

“Commander, you better come up front and take a look at this yourself,” she says into the intercom.