Meanwhile, Kris checked in regularly with her team.
Chief Beni continued to have no success getting anything out of the alien site. They had hunkered down. Now there was nothing on the radio circuits. The chief could see footprints and vehicle tracks in the dust around the plant, but everyone appeared to have taken cover in the two sprawling buildings. The reactor was producing almost double its original power outputs. Several capacitors were charging up, but if there were lasers, they were still cold.
“Simply put, I know squat. Professor mFumbo and his boffins on the other ships, they know squat. These folks like to keep themselves a secret,” the chief finished.
After that report, Kris was not surprised to find out Penny’s persistent efforts to open some kind of communication with the aliens had borne no fruit. She’d enlisted the boffins in her effort. But her distributed brain trust had no more luck talking to the aliens than Chief Beni had taking their pulse.
“They really don’t want to get to know us,” Jack said, as Kris and he pulled on their green-camouflaged flight gear.
“Grampa Ray got into a long and bitter fight with the Iteeche because they could not figure out a way to talk to each other,” Kris muttered, half to herself. “Now I’m getting us humans and the Iteeche into a war with someone who will not talk to us, no matter how hard we try.”
“That’s what it looks like,” Jack agreed, checking the neck gasket of Kris’s suit.
“Maybe if we can capture someone from this site, we can sit them down and force them to talk,” Kris said, doing the same check for Jack.
“Somehow, I don’t think hamburger and fries is going to make it happen,” Jack said, as he handed Kris her helmet. “Even if you throw in a strawberry shake.”
“Yeah,” Kris said. “I’m afraid that if we did capture a few, they’d suicide just like the ship that attacked us. It’s crazy. Someone or something has scared the daylights out of these people. They’d rather die than live as prisoners. The question I can’t figure out is whether or not the fear is for some really honking-huge bug-eyed monster or if it’s what that guy on the video is telling them, and they all believe it?”
“It would be nice if we could figure out what that dude is saying,” Jack agreed.
Kris put on her helmet, dogged it down, and chinned the oxygen outlet. Gas whispered into the suit.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky this time,” Jack said. His own helmet on, their conversation continued as a kind of radio check. “Maybe someone will survive the mass suicide. Maybe someone will choose life over death.”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” Kris said. “Try something often enough, and you’re bound to get what you want.”
Both the Greenfeld officer and command master chief were there to strap Kris into her strange ride. That was good. She banged her elbow on something hard.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s always there,” the lieutenant answered, telling her nothing.
The chief ducked his head in the cockpit. “Oh, that’s a crowbar.”
“Crowbar?” Jack echoed from his seat behind Kris.
“Yeah, back in the war they had problems getting the canopy open when they crashed. The pilots took to carrying crowbars with them. In the later refits, they actually hooked one to the side of the cockpit.”
“Don’t worry, Jack. We aren’t going to crash,” Kris said.
The reply from the guy in back didn’t rise above a mumble.
Preflight finished, Kris flew GAC-7 over to the Wasp and tied into the drop bay but didn’t leave the craft. The Fury went its way into a geosynchronous orbit thirty thousand klicks above the planet. The other four battleships, along with PatRon 10, dropped into low orbit. The tiny Hermes followed along in their wake.
The first orbit’s pass showed them nothing new. They dropped probes that only verified that there was nothing to see. Two large, three- or four-story buildings sprawled in front of a steep ridge. The best guess was that a mine shaft of some sort projected down and into the rocky ridge. The best scientific opinion was that the pile of dirt beside one of the buildings was mine tailings, but the analysis of that residue didn’t help them figure out what was going on inside the buildings.
The landing launches left the Wasp and battleships first. They would descend and loiter west of the site until Kris called them in. Kris detached from the Wasp last. Her descent would be steeper, letting her arrive over the aliens first.
Kris punched her braking engines, and whispered, “We’re committed.”
“God help us,” Jack added.
Kris took the GAC across the alien site at fifty thousand feet, and came away none the wiser for it. She honked the craft around into a steeply descending turn and crossed it again at twenty thousand feet, hammering it with a sonic boom.
That triggered something.
“Lasers,” Chief Beni shouted on net. “Rockets, too! I’m getting all kind of search and attack stuff for SAM guidance.”
Kris slammed her craft into a right bank, then went immediately into a split S turn, diving for the ground at the same time.
Then the real fun started.
39
“Rockets are tracking us,” Jack shouted from the backseat.
Kris only had time to glance over her shoulder for a second. Behind her, the alien site was obscured by smoke as wave after wave of rockets were ripple fired.
Most headed up. A few were headed for Kris.
Kris fired off flares and threw her craft into another S turn. That done, she popped chaff and more flares, then took off into another S, while aiming for the deck and praying her ugly old hog could still take as many gees as the ancient design specs called for.
The first rocket missed off to her right, but another exploded behind her, knocking her craft around. Like the good hog it was, it kept running, and Kris kept dodging.
Behind Kris, Jack was doing his best to get a view of the alien site. He slammed his helmeted head against the canopy first to the right, then to the left.
“I see infantry,” Jack shouted on net. “Lots and lots of infantry deploying from the buildings.”
There was a pause while he switched sides. “Two battalions. No make that three. Maybe four.”
Again Kris heard his helmet bounce off the canopy as he changed his viewpoint. “There are vehicles with them. Moving fast. Looks like guns on them.”
Kris slammed out of one turn, just dodged a rocket, and hurled the old hog into another.
Jack didn’t pause in his shouting this time. “Abort the landing. They are preparing to oppose the landing with a major force. Abort the landing.”
“I hear you,” came in the colonel’s calm voice. “The landing is canceled. We will return to orbit.”
“Don’t go near the alien site,” Kris said. “They’re gunning for us.”
“Understood. Avoid the alien construction.”
“Enough of this noise. They are shooting at my ships,” snarled Admiral Krätz. “I will show them you do not fire on an Imperial Greenfeld battleship.”
Kris coughed as she came awake. There was smoke in the cabin. She could smell it inside her suit. That wasn’t good.
“Jack, you okay?” she asked.
“I was wondering when you would rejoin the living,” he said.
“I’m alive,” she sputtered
“We need to get out of here.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right.” Kris hit the button to eject the canopy.
Nothing happened.
“Ejector doesn’t work,” she said.
“I could have told you that. Nothing works on this busted bucket of bolts. Want to try that crowbar you and the chief were talking about that we’d never need?”