“Finn, Staff Sergeant,” he had responded, proud of his heritage. At the confused expression he had followed up with his standard expansion: “You know, where reindeer come from?”
Most members of a Force Recon team had their “team name,” the nickname assigned by the team through some mystical process that involved a concensus of a short name or phrase that defined that person’s personality and position. He had come to regret his standard explanation a few months later when the magic moment came for him to be assigned his team name.
Kaijanaho lifted “up” to the surface of the thing carefully, using his laser range finder to determine how close he was and his approach speed. Up close, it was nearly impossible to tell how far away the thing was; there was no real depth perception possible. As he closed he grew more entranced by the wall of color above him, shifting in multiple hues. As he got to nearly arm-length it was apparent that what looked like one shade was, in fact, millions of hues mixed together, flowing just under a translucent surface like billions of multicolored blood corpuscles.
He reached up one Wyvern claw and, lightly, almost reverently touched the surface. It was hard but where he touched the light seemed to draw around, following his finger…
“Blitzen?” Sergeant Champion barked. “Readings?”
“Uh…” Kaijanaho replied, entranced by the swirling colors.
“Lance Corporal Kaijanaho!” the sergeant barked again. “Atten-hut!
“Sorry, Sergeant,” the lance corporal said, closing his eyes and lowering the claw of the suit. “Up close this stuff is hypnotic. My apologies.”
“Accepted,” Champion said. “Gimme some readings, Prancer.”
“Just lots of pentaquarks, Sergeant,” Kaijanaho said. “Actually, at this range I’m getting some slight alpha particle readings. Those are hazardous but the rad level is very low. About like a tritium watch face. No gamma or beta.”
“Shiny…” Champion said after a moment. “Pull back to your position, Rudolph.”
“It’s pretty hypnotic from up here, too,” Berg admitted.
“Agreed, sir,” Gunny Juda replied. “Orders?”
“Continue the sweep,” Berg said. “Onwards and upwards. But since I’ve spent, like, no time with the teams, can you explain why Lance Corporal Kaijanaho has three team names? And why they all seem to refer to Santa’s reindeer?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Eventually the Marines reached the point of full spread. At that point, the diameter of the “tree” was nearly six kilometers and the small unit of Marines could cover hardly any of the surface. However, it didn’t seem to matter. One spot was as good as any. Everywhere it was just color and points.
“All units, hold position,” Berg ordered as they approached the edge of the tree. “Gunny, the Flies tried this out so call me an old maid, but I’m not taking the whole platoon into the direct light of this sun until I’m sure it’s clear. Send a point.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“All clear, sir,” Sergeant Champion said. “The sun’s sort of… Well, it’s not too bright. And no hazardous rads. Levels are nominal as hell.”
Stars put out more than heat. The solar wind was composed of mostly protons, some alpha particles, and even a few electrons as masses of particles swept out from the fusion of hydrogen into helium and helium into still more massive particles. Radiation in space was always a hazard and this close to a blue star they should have been sleeted with the equivalent of several hundred thousand chest X-rays.
Instead, the retrans from the sergeant’s particle detectors said that the only generator in the area was the massive Tum-Tum Tree. The shield was absorbing or reflecting all the hazardous radiation from the nearby star. That had been one of Berg’s main concerns. The Cheerick suits had particle detectors, but to say the least even Colonel Che-chee was no expert at reading them. The lieutenant had been more worried about radiation than the possible heat.
Berg advanced the platoon up the slope and into the light of the sun then tuned his sensors on the surface of Gunny Juda’s suit to get a reading. The surface temperature of the suit in the shade had been minus one hundred and fifty-seven degrees Celsius. As it entered the light from the super-hot star, which should have kicked it up to over a thousand degrees celsius in an instant, it climbed to eighty-three degrees and stuck there. Hot, but the suit’s chillers could handle it easily.
When he came in sight of the sun he could see why the responses had been so varied. The sun looked extremely hot and bright. But there was an edge to it, like the watery sunshine of an ever-so-slightly overcast winter day that mentally translated as nonthreatening. And the actual power-input levels, inside the shield, were about the same as the suits experienced from Sol in Earth orbit.
The view from the top of the spread was spectacular, the sweeping rear side dropping to the “trunk.” Berg got a sudden moment of vertigo and realized this must be what a spider felt like on a real Christmas tree. A very, very, very small spider. More like a mite.
“Slow and easy down the back side,” Berg ordered. “Maintain one hundred meters from the tree and proceed to the joining of the trunk.”
“Sir,” Lance Corporal Fuller said, “we’re losing contact with the Blade.”
Fuller was the designated platoon RTO. With the compliment of Marines on the Blade being so small and the commo being so integrated, the position was a secondary one for the Charlie Team cannoneer. All it really meant was that he was carrying a long-range laser transmitter tuned to communicate with the Blade. But while the system was line-of-sight…
“Put in a retrans box,” Gunny Juda growled before Berg could open his mouth.
“We need to hold up while he does that,” the LT pointed out. “Platoon, hold position.”
The retrans box was the size of a Vietnam era radio but had interplanetary range. Fuller pulled it off his armor and then looked at the edge of the tree.
“Gunny, there’s no place to affix it,” the RTO pointed out.
“Time to find out how miraculous space tape really is,” the gunny replied. “You do have a roll with you, don’t you, Lance Corporal?”
“Uh…”
“Here,” Berg said with a sigh, reaching into the cargo hatch on the back of his suit. “Use mine.”
Space tape once again proved its miraculous nature by sticking to the surface of whatever the tree was made of. Fuller extended the transmission wand and the receptor mirror and backed his board away from the edge.
“All done, sir.”
“Let’s move,” Berg said. “Platoon, continue approach to the trunk.”
As they got closer, particle emissions climbed sharply. But there still was nothing of a hazardous nature. The closest to it was a sharp spike in neutrinos, but neutrinos were so small, fast and slippery that until the Adar came along the only way to detect them was with massive quantities of a special solvent in undergound tanks. The rest was stuff that had even less effect. But it proved that something very strange was going on in the interior of the massive artifact.
“Anybody see anything like an opening?” Berg asked as they approached the face of the trunk. The trunk itself was just under nine football fields in diameter, bigger around than the largest stadium on Earth. The Marines were dwarfed by the massive construction of the tree.
“Negative here, sir,” Staff Sergeant Carr commented.
“Negative, sir,” Sergeant Champion replied.
“Nada, sir,” Sergeant Eduardo Bae finished.