Tommy Thorn Marked (21 page)

Sloan flexed his gloved fingers, unconsciously gripping his forearm restraints. Then, tilting his helmeted head back, he felt the reassuring tightness of the EAM pad’s downward pressure.

Two, one…

The dark, partially cloaked, drop ship didn’t even quiver as one by one, in quick succession, the insertion capsules were fired, like bullets from an ancient gun. Each of the stealthy cylinders trailing long gray-white columns of super-heated gas as they plummeted toward the planet below. Riding the can!

Now past the shock and paralyzing forces of the initial acceleration, Sloan raised his right arm in order to monitor the green glow of navigation data being displayed on his wristcomm. He did this, even though once the capsule’s launch had been initiated, there wasn’t anything for the occupant to do. Braking thrusters fired automatically, and internal guidance, which was designed to exacting tolerances, would ensure impacts, er, landings, within ten feet of preprogrammed coordinates.

Still, viewing the real-time position of the can relative to the projected entry data made one feel better.
Right on the curve
, he thought just as a yellow annunciator, which was integrated into an advisory panel located above the porthole, suddenly illuminated and began to flash at regular intervals.

Seeing the light, Sloan again gripped the armrest and waited for the first of several thruster firings designed to slow down his one-man missile, now screaming along at over 27,000 miles per hour—yellow, yellow…

Abruptly, the flashing yellow light went steady, signaling the firing of the thruster, which violently shook the capsule. These atmospheric entries were far worse than, say, a moon drop, but the vibration currently blurring Sloan’s vision aside, it was always nice to feel the reassuring jolt of the braking thrusters.

Sloan’s mind recalled an image of Lieutenant Tandee, or what was left of him after his capsule had failed to fire during a training drop.
He had what, twelve minutes, to think about
the impact
, he thought.
And it was a light cycle drop, so he could have seen the horizon closing
… Sloan cursed himself, blinked back the grotesque mental image, and refocused on the mission at hand. “Concentrate, Sloan!” he demanded as again the yellow light began to flash.

Candar-Leaf yawned, stretching his long arms while looking up from his thin curved monitor and control panel at the mostly empty hundred or so consoles spread out neatly in the bull pit below. It was either very late or very early, but regardless of the time, he was finding it harder and harder to stay focused. The young Vargus officer, along with most of the duty section for the PDCC, had been pulling doubles for a full month. And it wasn’t just the southern hemisphere command. All of Vargus, indeed the entire Alliance, was on high alert. The Empire was coming, and war was at hand. Okay, but at this rate, with false alarm after false alarm, if the Tarchein were indeed coming, they would find the whole planetary defense command just too darn worn out to fight!

Beep-bop, beep-bop. Candar-Leaf’s comm link jarred him back to alertness.

“Duty officer Candar-Leaf, station Stone Wood,” he said into a small handheld comm mic.

“This is Major Santo-Dread, tracking array Lima has detected a level seven distortion in your grid. Initiate the Jasper protocol. I repeat, the Jasper protocol. Authentication to follow…”

The flustered duty officer fumbled to get the code of the day and the voice-recognition pattern displayed.

“Seven, alpha, six, two, ten, tango, tango, jammer, eight,” Santo-Dread continued.

Candar-Leaf followed along, then checked the voice pattern before he replied, “Authenticate, ruby, ruby, tango, mike, ninner.”

There was a pause, then. “Authentication confirmed. Santo-Dread—out!”

The duty officer blinked back a moment of disbelief before turning his command chair and, looking up toward Commissar Oden-Car, pushed a large mushroom-shaped alarm plunger.

The commissar had been slowly pacing, hands clasped behind his back, for hours across the grey stone floor of his subterranean bunker. The glare of the harsh overhead lighting danced across a chest full of colorful awards, which were affixed to a long white uniform jacket that flared at the waist and fluttered with every easy stride of his polished tan boots. The old commissar, upon seeing the latest deep-space sensor data and noting the rare occurrence of a clear moonless night, had become convinced that a Tarchein attack was imminent.
Tonight is the night, all right
, Oden-Car thought. He’d bet his life on it. But thoughts of invasion and loss of life, even his own, did not fill the general with a sense of dread, quite the contrary. For even now, as the command and control complex went into high alert and anxious personnel took up their stations, the commissar was filled with a sense of calm. He was fully confident in the capabilities of the planetary defense systems—systems he had designed and implemented.

“Sir, we have a probable course plotted. Should we ready the gun batteries?” a major’s voice crackled in the commissar command bunker. The note of anxiety in his voice annoyed the commissar.

“No!” Oden-Car paused, allowing himself the pleasure of a sinister smile. “No, Major, we’ll keep the guns silent for now. I wouldn’t want to frighten away the all-mighty Imperial Star Force,” he said and continued watching the orderly preparation taking place below. “Come on, you Tarchein sons of bitches, we’re ready for you,” the Commissar continued, although the clear steel that surrounded his isolated, elevated suite prevented anyone, save a few of his staff, from hearing. And they, unlike the confident commissar, were filled with a great dread…

All vibration now stopped, Sloan could make out three distinct external thuds as the telescopic arms of the landing tripod extended and locked into position.
Won’t be long now,
he thought, activating his helmet’s integrated night-enhanced-vision feature, and then braced himself for touchdown.
Come on, baby, stay upright.

The actual landing wasn’t too bad. The capsule’s extended legs did their job of dampening out the impact and, most importantly, keeping his can upright. “Move it, Sloan,” he said as he popped the hatch, jumped the two feet into the soft, dry ground, and lunged for the pod’s small external cargo holds manual release.

Retrieving the hard-shelled equipment case, Sloan swung around, pulled his short-nosed assault blaster to the ready, and headed for the cover of the foothills. Laboring through ankle-deep shifting sand, he crossed a hundred yards of potentially deadly open ground before reaching, and weaving through, sparsely spaced, tall, broad-leafed palm trees and slamming down behind several large rocks. Only then, while gulping in large amounts of the cool desert air, did he roll over and look back at his capsule, checking for any signs of detection.

The drop zone he had chosen was as close to the edge of the isolated eastern foothills as he dared risk. What with large numbers of randomly spaced boulders, only a dozen miles from the first of many protective force fields, and the real possibility of landing in the nearby river—well this location had been the best out of some very bad choices. But at least this site would allow his team time to complete a quick recon before taking up concealed positions in the mountainous high ground overlooking a broad plain that had been designated as this region’s landing zone for the invasion. The six-square-mile sand dune, code named Phang, would not have been Sloan’s ideal planet-fall location, but he figured that the brass must know what they were doing, and anyway, his job wasn’t to question their decisions; it was to put together the best plan he could, one that would allow him to complete the mission, while at the same time keeping his team alive…

The southern hemisphere’s cities, power supplies, military targets, and planetary defense grids were all located on a two-hundred-mile-wide coastline that stretched for thousands of miles. This densely populated area was protected on the east by a band of majestic, snow-covered, jagged mountains that acted as a natural barrier between the coastal regions and a barren expanse of real estate, known as the Shifting Sea. The sea, as it turned out, was actually a gigantic patch of cream-colored sand, windblown and rippled like small waves. It covered most of the region and actually looked very much like a shallow brown ocean when studied from high-altitude recon photos.

Satisfied that his landing site had not been compromised, although somewhat startled to find that his capsule had missed landing on a large outcrop of rocks by a mere couple of feet, Sloan lay back against an irregular-shaped chunk of mountain, legs stretched out in the sand, and adjusted his helmet’s audio sensors to max.

To his great relief, all seemed quiet, and he sat there for a moment, catching his breath and enjoying the silence.

“LT, I’ve got a fix on your position. Be there in one mike.”

Sloan recognized Decker’s breathless voice but did not respond.
This sand is brutal,
he thought. Glancing at his wristcomm, he reduced the range of his suits limited surveillance mode. Sure enough, there were twelve symbols making their way toward his position, with Decker’s highlighted triangle leading the way.
Everyone on the ground, phase one complete,
he thought. And for the first time since he was a couple a hundred thousand feet over this sandbox, he felt his heart rate slow to something close to normal.

Oden-Car bent slightly, letting his muscular fingers dance across the command console before turning to his chief of staff, Colonel Batha-Nue. “I’m initiating planetary defense level five. Notify Field Marshal Dee-Trah personally. I want weapons online in three minutes.”

There was no sense of urgency to his movements, no change in Oden-Car’s hard features as he turned his back on the colonel and returned to his command console before picking up his handheld mic. “General Indio-Han, I need your squadrons flexed, and let’s get some eyes in the air,” the commissar’s steady voice boomed over the air force general’s headset as the three-story display board of the massive control room went to tactical.

General Indio-Han, who along with several other commanders had taken seats behind the duty officer’s station, flinched at the sound of his name. The general was in charge of Stone Wood’s air arm, responsible for over forty squadrons, which he controlled and monitored through delegation. A full one-third of the officers in the bull pit below plus countless numbers of pilots, weapon operators and maintenance personnel were assigned to air ops and under his direct command.

“Major Zimmer-Tie,” Indio-Han said into his comm link.

Far below, the major’s head stirred but did not look back toward the general. Instead, he had chosen to look up, focusing all of his attention on the tracks and symbols moving across the gigantic tactical board. Where the Strategic Initiative and Tactical Assessment Computer, or SITAC, had already plotted several possible planetary probing positions based on the early distortion tracks and now displayed them on a God’s-eye view of the operational area.

Indio-Han used a finger to highlight and drag three squadron designators onto the tactical board. “Deploy the Third, Forty-Seventh, and the Tenth fighter squadrons,” the general said, and then after a moment added, “and go to yellow in the hanger bay.”